GeorgiaDragRacing.com - Information about Georgia drag racing history, personalities, activities and events.
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GeorgiaDragRacing.com - Information about Georgia drag racing history, personalities, activities and events.
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Important News About GeorgiaDragRacing.comby John L. Dilbeck I am saddened to have to announce that we are forced to make some big changes to GeorgiaDragRacing.com. These events are out of our control, as I'll discuss below. For months, I've been fighting intrusions by malicious hackers who have been stealing bandwidth, loading disallowed software, and attacking other computers from our server. With the outstanding help of the SysAdmin and support staff at our host, we've been able to detect and delete these attacks. However, on May 5, 2004, we were informed by our host that we had reached a final point. These attacks had caused them extra work and they could no longer allow the attacks to continue. If any further intrusions were detected, our account would be cancelled and we would have to move the entire site to another hosting service -- and this site is well over 2,000 pages and growing. David and I had a long talk last evening and decided we like this host and the outstanding support we receive and want to do everything in our power to be good Internet citizens and customers that don't cause any trouble. While we can't do anything about the attacks we've been suffering, we could make one last attempt to close as many cracks in the security as possible. To that end, we decided to kill all scripts that are running on this site. We've had PERL scripts powering the bookstore, photo album, and news. They've been deleted. A series of PHP scripts powered the forum. They've been deleted. This may have a major impact on the usability of the site for a few days as I work diligently to find and squash any problems that result from this major change that affects just about every page on the site. Fortunately, no actual functionality will be lost, but there will be changes in how we'll present them, and they won't all be hosted locally on this domain. We will lose, however, many of the photos and discussions that were in the Photo Album and Forum. The Photo Album is dead and won't be resurrected. That's going to cause a lot of broken links, and I may not be able to find all of them. If you encounter a broken link on the site after June 1, 2004, please let me know at jd@johndilbeck.com so I can fix it. I'd appreciate it if you'd include the URL of the page and a brief description of what's broken. UPDATE! (May 23, 2004) -- Because of a temporary fit of insanity, I decided to take a couple of weeks and recreate the Photo Album in a rather different format. All the photos are restored and available. This will not fix the broken links mentioned in the paragraph, above, but that is unavoidable. At least, now you can link to the photos and/or the albums. David will resume loading photos to his account at ImageStation.com. I don't know when, or if, he'll be able to move the photos that were originally hosted here onto that server. It may be that only future photos will be uploaded there. David's available time and energy may make the decision for him. We will no longer post news updates on the News page. From now on, David will upload them to the new Georgia Drag Racing News blog at gdrn.blogspot.com. As soon as possible, I'll replace all the links to point to the new blog. The bookstore will be a major challenge since most pages on the site interact with the program that was powering it. I'll be replacing all links with new links that are not subject to attack by hackers -- at least from the point of view of gaining access to modifying our account on the server. This will take the longest time and I'll have to do it as I can find the time while still doing all the other tasks I'm obligated to perform. I'll get to it as soon as possible. The forum is dead and won't be reactivated. I've replaced the forum index page so that it invites you go join our mailing list hosted by Yahoo, or to read the postings on the website they provide for the list. You do not have to subscribe to the list to read the postings on the website. David and I both deeply regret having to make this decision and implement these steps in a last attempt to keep our account with an excellent host. They have been more than patient and have worked diligently with us for far longer than they normally would. For this, we thank them. Hopefully, these steps will stop the hackers and we'll have a home here for a long time. However, if you come to GeorgiaDragRacing.com one of these days and find that it has disappeared, don't give up on us. If we are forced to move, I'll arrange for a new server and rebuild the site as quickly as I can. We ask for your understanding and patience as we make this somewhat difficult transition. Hopefully, I'll have the dust cleared away in a few weeks and David will be able to continue bringing you the news and pictures that you've come to expect here at GeorgiaDragRacing.com We appreciate every single one of you who finds something of interest at this site and we hope to provide continuing coverage of news, events, people, and other items of interest related to Drag Racing in Georgia. Thank you for being one of our valued visitors. Please come back. All the best, JD
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