Welcome to the New Forum! (+how to access your old account)

[Red Squirrel]

It's been over a decade since I wanted to do this, and kept getting side tracked and the years just kept going by. Well finally, it's done. Iceteks.com, anythingforums.com, uovalor.com and uogateway.com are now combined into this new forum, and we are now live!


Note: We are currently in a soft launch mode. We are live, but may still have back end things to iron out, and have not sent out a mass email to old members yet. If you encounter any issues trying to create or recover an account do feel free to report it but do be aware we are still doing lot of testing and tweaking as not everything is 100% yet.



Accessing your old account
If you had an account at any of the 4 sites above you can go here to do a password reset. You can go by username or by email address, which ever one you remember. (same goes for when you login) If you had an account at more than one of those sites and the email did not match it could be your username got renamed, so for that reason I suggest using your email to initiate the password reset.

Topics
All topics, going as far back as late 2002, have also been transferred over and to the best of my knowledge most formatting should more or less work as well. There was a serious amount of testing and time that went into making sure that things are formatted properly, I even went as far as fixing stuff that broke during previous conversions way back in the day. All old topics are locked, with an archive note at the bottom. I may unlock some threads to keep them going and if anyone wants a thread unlocked PM me, but in general I just want to encourage to start new topics.

Some very brief history on how things came to be
Iceteks.com was a small tech site I ran and my first ever website and domain. The domain itself was registered in 2003 but the forum actually ran on a self hosted server on a dynu.net hostname before for a bit. It was actually originally called PC411 and eventually renamed to Iceteks in 2002 or so.

I used to also post at a forum called anythingforums.com. The owner decided he did not want to run it anymore, and at that point I was a mod (or admin... don't remember) and he decided to let me take it over instead of shutting it down. So ran both forums independently for a while but a lot of users posted at both.

In 2006 while in college I started Age of Valor, an Ultima Online server. Naturally, it had a forum too. uovalor.com. Iceteks and Anything Forums kinda got neglected more at this point due to focusing on AoV but also just life in general. College, then eventually graduating and getting a full time job, house, and that kind of stuff. Iceteks and Anythingforums fell out of date to the point that they kept getting hacked and overrun with spammers and I decided to temporarily take them offline until I can update them... which well, never really happened.

A bit later I managed to acquire uogateway.com which was a pretty popular domain in the Ultima Online community as it was a server list where you could pick a shard and login to it. The owner eventually stopped maintaining it around 2008 and let the domain drop which was won by someone else in an auction, but they let it drop and then I won it, in 2009. Naturally... yet another forum sprouted up when I revived the site as a top site list and also added a forum. At this point I went from running 1 forum to 2 to 3 and then back to 2, with 2 others on the back burner for updating. It's around this time I started to think of combining everything. This is where the idea of the central account system came into play as well because the idea I had in mind is that the UO account would also be the forum account. Iceteks.com itself was also still alive and well, just not the forum, but I had mostly neglected to update or do anything with it.

Fast forward to some time in late 2021, my server that hosted all of this stuff got hacked and they trashed everything to the point that it no longer booted up. Since this is a dedicated server in a data centre where I don't have physical access it makes troubleshooting and forensics harder but they did have a rescue mode where I could see what the disk content looked like without being booted into the OS and that's how I found we were hacked based on the log files being all scrambled and lot of weird activity in general. I was kind of discouraged as I just had so much stuff to rebuild. I had backups, but still, having to reinstall the OS, reconfigure everything etc is a big pain. The OS was out of date so wanted to go with something newer which means I can't just use the config files from old server since the syntax/format changes a lot between distros. Half way though rebuilding the brand new server it got hacked again while the backups were being uploaded overnight. At this point I decided to cut my losses and shut down everything and give myself time to think this over more and figure out a new approach. It was also close to Christmas and I just wanted to try to enjoy the holiday season. I relaunched UO Gateway on Feb 2022 to gauge whether or not the hacker was still trying to hit me, and I just wanted to get the site going again and all my other sites now had a place holder page just redirecting to this site's status page. Everything has been fine since.

I still have no idea how they got in, because the 2nd time they hacked the server there were no websites configured yet and not much services in general, so really not much attack surface. I am going to guess it was some kind of zero day in Debian or something. I had not fully updated the server yet and Apache was running a placeholder page just nothing else.

With all that said, in the process of dealing with the hacker I greatly downsized the amount of online projects I have going on, and as of now it's basically going to be this forum, and UO Gateway. Now that this forum is actually up and working, I will work on actually keeping up with updates and enhancements etc. What made this deployment tricky is I wanted to make sure to do it in such a way that updates are easier, so it took a lot more thought to get everything going such as the account system. Normally I would just edit core files directly but this time I figured out how to make all changes as a plugin, which is much harder to do but makes maintenance easier.

Now you may be wondering what is even the point of the account system, well this idea was originally started before the hack when I had more services working so goal was to tie them all together including the game server login. Since I had already started this route I decided to stick to it in case I do in fact relaunch stuff.

So that's the jist of it, quite a lot has happened over the years and I'm happy to finally be at the point where this forum is up and running. Historically, any time I did a big launch for Iceteks such as a new forum or server move it was often around Christmas, so this soft launch timing seems to fit nicely.

Welcome to the new forum, Merry Christmas, and happy new year!