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Astaro.org

AlanT

Hi Everyone,

we've been planning a migration to a newer and more capable forum site for some time now, and were just a few weeks away from kicking off this process. Unfortunately, a recent vulnerability has appeared in the wild, affecting vBulletin, the software we were using for the astaro.org communities site. Astaro.org was not compromised from this vulnerability, but as a precaution, we did take the site down, to protect our users. 

The site used a number of add-ons, and some custom plugins, which would need weeks of effort to convert and replace, if we were to upgrade the site and apply fixes for this vulnerability. As we were planning to migrate by that time anyway, we've made the decision to cut immediately to the new communities site, which has been running successfully for other Sophos products. To that end, we've spun up two forums quickly, where astaro.org users can again congregate. unfortunately, it will still take some time to complete the migration, so user accounts, and previously posted content has not yet been migrated. This process will take a matter of weeks to complete. In the interim, we will create a static view of the astaro.org, so content there will still be accessible. This should be completed later today.

This certainly wasn't the introduction we wanted for our new communities site, but we are excited about the new platform, and its capabilities. Please be patient as we step through this transition as quickly as we can. There will be some pain, but we will try our best to minimize it for you. 

Thanks everyone for your patience, and understanding!

Alan Toews

Technical Product Manager, Network Security, Sophos



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Parents
  • What a poor excuse for shutitng down the astaro.org forum...;)
    Alan, you should be honest...telling that this was directive from upstream management.
  • in reply to vilic
    Perhaps that's meant to be a funny comment vilic, but let me be blunt. We were always planning to migrate away from vBulletin. This isn't a secret, and we were fully planning to migrate to this forum system, from the extremely old version of vBulletin we were using. We were not running the most recent version of the software, because a key plugin we were using offered no upgrade. Upgrading vBulletin without being able to upgrade this plugin would break the entire site, in some very bad ways. We could create a replacement for this plugin ourselves, but it would take far too long. Our IT security team has already been pushing for the site to be upgraded or retired for quite some time. Now, with this latest vulnerability, our security team determined that this was simply too much risk to accept. Perhaps it would have been harmless to leave the site up, but there was simply too much uncertainty, and given the age of the code we were on, and the inability to upgrade to a newer version, it would be irresponsible to leave the site up based on a maybe. You can argue the decision if you like, but it's Sophos who bears the biggest risk of being wrong.

    For those who have some frustrations with this site, please be patient. There are still a few pieces that were meant to be in place before we started the migration. Because of the accelerated timetable, there's still a few more wrinkles than we wanted to show you, and there are a couple features this site doesn't have. But the point of this forum is for our users to share information with each other. To ask questions, and find answers, and also to allow discussion between our users. This new site, and its features, are more suited to this goal, than the old vBulletin. As for the mobile app, the one available for astaro.org was on its last legs already. It was end-of-lifed by its vendor, several years ago, and would have stopped working had we simply upgraded to the latest vBulletin version.

    The bottom line is that astaro.org was aging none too gracefully. We had hoped for a little more time to make the transition smoother, but as you can see, we didn't get it, and I am sorry for the frustrations you may feel from this.
Reply
  • in reply to vilic
    Perhaps that's meant to be a funny comment vilic, but let me be blunt. We were always planning to migrate away from vBulletin. This isn't a secret, and we were fully planning to migrate to this forum system, from the extremely old version of vBulletin we were using. We were not running the most recent version of the software, because a key plugin we were using offered no upgrade. Upgrading vBulletin without being able to upgrade this plugin would break the entire site, in some very bad ways. We could create a replacement for this plugin ourselves, but it would take far too long. Our IT security team has already been pushing for the site to be upgraded or retired for quite some time. Now, with this latest vulnerability, our security team determined that this was simply too much risk to accept. Perhaps it would have been harmless to leave the site up, but there was simply too much uncertainty, and given the age of the code we were on, and the inability to upgrade to a newer version, it would be irresponsible to leave the site up based on a maybe. You can argue the decision if you like, but it's Sophos who bears the biggest risk of being wrong.

    For those who have some frustrations with this site, please be patient. There are still a few pieces that were meant to be in place before we started the migration. Because of the accelerated timetable, there's still a few more wrinkles than we wanted to show you, and there are a couple features this site doesn't have. But the point of this forum is for our users to share information with each other. To ask questions, and find answers, and also to allow discussion between our users. This new site, and its features, are more suited to this goal, than the old vBulletin. As for the mobile app, the one available for astaro.org was on its last legs already. It was end-of-lifed by its vendor, several years ago, and would have stopped working had we simply upgraded to the latest vBulletin version.

    The bottom line is that astaro.org was aging none too gracefully. We had hoped for a little more time to make the transition smoother, but as you can see, we didn't get it, and I am sorry for the frustrations you may feel from this.
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