Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad security

Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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And I'm personally worried about my personal data here!

I mean, the password must be between 6 and 16 characters long. Seriously? Is there any good reason for an upper limit of the password to be as low as 16 characters in 2018? 64 or 128 characters seems reasonable. Would it take too much resources on you, or you simply designed the site long ago when security wasn't that high of a priority as today? Especially given the polarizing political landscape. Similarly, some users may find your arbitrary short limit for email addresses equally uncomfortable.

As for the warning. Sure, Chase isn't as hated on the far left as Roosh is. Who is quite mindful about the security of his online community, by the way. But he isn't seem to be as accepted into the mainstream discussion as Mark Manson is. I see Chase somewhere in between the two. Is it conscious lifestyle choice for him? I can only guess. Nonetheless, the site seems to be an easy target. so for bored activists, why not? And as a user, I do not feel safe with the defaults. R. Don Steele was recently hacked. Just sayin.'

On a side note, you can read Roosh's forum comfortably on a mobile phone, while you can't do the same with Chase's forum on the device you are likely to use the most.
 

Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

I get back to this later when I have more time.

Now just the quick version. If I understand correctly, it's not financially viable for Chase' plans to grow the user base by much of this forum in 2018, nor to make it look more modern, be it easily accessible by mobile devices, etc. It's more like a relic of the past. Fair enough.

But my question here now is, if he sees better to keep this forum running than shutting it down, then is is financially viable to give users basic security, such as allowing passwords longer than 16-characters? (That's a 2013 article.) Also if it's an old forum software, there are sure many documented security holes already, and there are forces out there with the time, expertise, and commitment to make use of them and publish the private data of users here public. I don't feel safe with my personal data here. Check out no. 3 in your own search results here! It seems somebody already put Chase on some cheeky hate list.

So if it's not financially viable in this form, it may not be unreasonable to shut it down. But of course, a public forum bring in paying customers, too, so it's a catch-22. Alternatively, you can find a business model in which a secure, up to date, and lively public forum is financially viable. Roosh V may have done it with his forum. Modern marketing is about network effects, not about page view stats of your domain. Network effects mean putting your name out on as many platforms as you reasonably can, including your own site and blog, social media, YouTube, published books on Amazon, interviews with others (which pop up in the search engines and YouTube), even video games. That's what Roosh V, Mark Manson, and as I've recently noticed, many new, up and coming authors do, including our own Tony D. Tony has a blog on his domain, he's on YouTube under his name, and has published books on Amazon under his personal brand as well. And it seems to me that, compared to them, Chase Amante follows a kind of old school marketing strategy, which may have been exciting in the early 2010s, but sure the world has moved on since. But I write more on this later.

The Urban Dictionary link for Chase coming up 3rd place is particularly curious as no other dating advice guys' names I've checked come up on Urban Dictionary in a negative light in such a prominent place in the search engines. Don't forget to build on network effects! It's the way to 'hide' this negative entry from the search engines. Heck, even if you write Roosh V into the same search engine, you get 'better' results by the top hits being a list of many of his social media accounts - and a Guardian article. But he is deliberately controversial.

Space said:
Oh, and if it's the most visited, and let's assume for a moment, also most engaged with dating advice site on the planet, how come it was not a viable option to upgrade the forum to be enjoyable from mobile devices in the last 10 years? While the audience slowly but surely, went mobile.
OK the, forum is not worth the upgrade for the mobile age, but how about the main site and blog itself? I'm reading a lots of stuff on mobile and coudn't escape to notice that the Girls Chase blog posts use some smaller characters than what 99% of the other sites and blogs I'm reading. Like painfully small characters. On a positive note, that's a room for improvement. Thanks!
 

Tony D

Tribal Elder
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

Forums are a lot of work. I remember when MASF was super duper active, back in 2007. It was already dying then. It's too bad.

I've had sjw's try to doxx me, and being a guy who talks about fight club does come at a cost. But I'm luckily anti-fragile as long as people keep hiring me for coaching and buying my books. Unfortunately I'll probably have to do more Youtube if I want to exist in this profession in 2020. I like that GirlsChase exists because it's one of the few, maybe the only, very popular blog that caters to writers and readers who just want to learn about game.

But yeah forums are not really a big thing for seduction anymore. Most guys I know went to facebook and Whattsapp groups. Or they hang out on different forums that talk more about culture war, travel, or working out. For pure game they tend to hang out in RSD circles.

As a writer with a pretty heavy workload I'd love to spend more time foruming but I have enough writing to do. I only have so much pickup talk in me.

Forums are only as popular as their most active great writers and moderators.
 

Chase

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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

Space-

A forum overhaul is already underway. I'm aware the forum looks old and activity's fallen.

I'm not on here much, but I do indeed view the community as important. I'm not sure what the business value of a forum is... but I've always liked forums, I came up on a forum, and I view having one (that is active and well maintained) as just an all-around good thing.


SITE SECURITY

We have very healthy site security, and security for the boards.

Each app is kept in its own server partition, and we have a cloud proxy, anti-DDoS, hacking/malware protection and monitoring, and a (fairly expensive) security expert who is on-call 24/7. All administrative passwords are long and complicated... 50+ characters with special keys, etc. Even if you somehow got an offline copy of the database it would take a quite long time for even a very powerful supercomputer to crack those passwords. You'd need a state actor.

We have dealt with DDoS attacks and backdoor attempts (none successful in gaining access, but they did use to regularly bring the site offline) in the past. It was particularly bad in early 2015, before we increased security. We had a lot of downtime in those days; sometimes they would bring the site offline for half a day or more. Much of the security precautions we have now were to make us immune to these types of attacks. And the security expert we brought on earlier this year has gone around tightening the ship everywhere else he saw anything remotely vulnerable to attack. We've had three server outages, totaling about 50 minutes of downtime, the entire last 30 days, all due to either us putting the site into maintenance mode to do an upgrade or a server instance shut down/reboot.

User passwords for the boards I suppose are more crackable. If you're using 16 characters and your password isn't "password12345678" or something easily guessed you will not be cracked. (on top of that, I doubt Antifa wants to hack the password of a random user on the forum... not much you could do with that aside from find out his email address and send posts or PMs posing as him. The work involved in trying to guess passwords vs. the possible payoff just is not there)

Anyway, when we upgrade the tech we will also make tougher (and longer) passwords mandatory.


SITE UPGRADES

What we're already working on now (has been being discussed all year, but we started movement on it this month):

We are moving the site over to xenForo, a more powerful forum software. We're designing the new look of the forum right now. After it's moved, we're fairly likely to give it its own domain name. We have a bunch of prominent guys who've said they'd like to post here but don't want to post on a "commercial board", that is directly tied to a business. And I think it'd be better for the forum to be standalone as well. So we're looking at doing that. It'll still link back to GC and GC will still link to it in the navigation bar, it'll just have a separate website.

I agree contributor activity on the boards would boost engagement a lot. Alek is a big forum guy and he's been the one leading the charge to revamp the GC boards and get them their own domain name - he wants to get a lot more involved after that. I intend to get more re-involved again once we've revamped it as well and my plate is a little more clear.

So, it's coming. It's on its way.

Chase
 

Big Daddy

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

Chase said:
I'm not sure what the business value of a forum is...

Well, Hector probably generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for the company, and he pretty much appeared on the scene via these boards, so there's one.

I second the importance of a community. I'm glad you guys are taking steps to make it better.
 

Big Daddy

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

I should probably take this opportunity to suggest a feature where we could filter posts by LR, FR, etc. It would be great!

AFAIK the only way we have of doing it now is sorting alphabetically.
 

Chase

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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

BD-

Yes, producing guys who later become contributors to GC articles, videos, programs, etc. is a big value of forums to the business side of things. Almost everyone who's contributed to the site to any extent has come from a forum - whether mASF (Alek, Cody, Tony, myself) or this one (Hector, Varoon, J.J. Jones, Richard).

That's for sure another reason the community is important to me. You need new guys coming up who can become the future stars, when the old guys (like me) can't do it.

Big Daddy said:
I should probably take this opportunity to suggest a feature where we could filter posts by LR, FR, etc. It would be great!

Yep - already possible in xenForo, the software we're moving to.

To do it, you go to the Field Reports board, click on the "LR" (or "FR", or "OR", or what have you) - or use the "Thread Display Options" at bottom - and you can sort by prefix.

We have this working on the Alumni Forum (which One Date buyers have access to), and will have it on the boards once we've updated the software.

Chase
 

Big Daddy

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

Sweet! Great to know.

Thanks Chase.
 

Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

Tony D said:
Unfortunately I'll probably have to do more Youtube if I want to exist in this profession in 2020.
I personally like YouTube for a few things. Even for a learning platform. I think in general more people learn more effectively in an audiovisual form than reading. What if you still want to be a writer? You have 24 hours a day and I realize you probably can't be the best YouTube educator and blogger at the same time. Sorry for referencing Mark Manson over and over again, he also prefers to be a writer to being the audiovisual teacher. So he just put up the audio versions of his articles on YouTube to have a presence there. He seems to be doing OK with them.

Chase said:
and a (fairly expensive) security expert who is on-call 24/7.
This actually has a name: Security through obscurity, but I appreciate the efforts you guys put in!

Chase said:
We are moving the site over to xenForo, a more powerful forum software.
Can you perhaps show an example of a xenForo forum of any community non-IT related? I've only found IT-related xenForo forums as examples when looking around, so I find it a curious choice for this community. I wonder if it the idea came from your designer or IT team?

As for other which layouts may work better for a general, non-IT audience as far as I have an insight on this, the one Roosh uses (MyBB) looks good, and sure is secure because I bet many people actively try to hack Roosh's forum and so far it has survived.

But if I were your designer I'd recommend Discourse. It seems to be the choice of most next generation communities with more modern community features. It's not as if forums and communities around them are dead forever, rather they are just going through a transformation these days I've read somewhere.

Chase said:
After it's moved, we're fairly likely to give it its own domain name.
Like rooshv.com and rooshvforum.com. If it worked for him, it's reasonably assume it should work for you, too.

Let me not forget! A time edit window longer than 2 hours would be neat. I find even something like a week (like on Disqus) not to be unreasonable.

Good to hear this project is not dead yet!
 

Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
Joined
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Messages
563

Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Messages
563
Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

OK, I know sometime this forum is be upgraded, but in the meantime, a quick tip to improve all users' privacy: Only registered users should be able to search all posts by a user, not guest visitors.
 

ray_zorse

Modern Human
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

I may be in the minority but I really like the current forum SW. I am often thinking how minimal and clean it is compared to a lot of other forums that I use. To me this gives it a modern look so I am surprised to hear it described as ancient etc. A version upgrade would not hurt I guess, but I like the comfort and security of knowing that the thing I have invested time into, responds in a reliable and predictable fashion. Don't knock it!

That said, I have some issues/questions:
1. Will phpBB forum content be exported into xenForo?
2. Does this include PMs? I put some LRs into PM that I didn't want to make public. Should I go rescue them?
3. In the phpBB system, would it be possible for admins to send me a dump of all my posts in context?

The reason I ask the last question is because the search facility in current software is quite broken, specifically that it ignores "common" words in the search string.

There is a post in beginner board in which I want to reply with links to some conversation samples from my earlier posts. I have made thousands of posts and many of them had conversation samples, since conversation is or was a special interest and perhaps my best fundamental.

However I cannot find the relevant posts, I searched for "cold read" and "conversation" and various fragments of common conversations, but search ignored every word!

I would really like to make a "conversation compilation".

I guess I could create a webscraper software but I feel reluctant to invest the time and also overload the board.

cheers, Ray
 

Space

Tool-Bearing Hominid
Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Re: Early warning: Antifa or SJW will come and hack you, this site has bad secur

I know it's an old forum and it gets upgraded eventually (eventually; now it's fashion business time) but here's a basic forum feature every forum has I really miss here: Advanced Search. Searching by keyword AND username at the same time. I know I can do these things separately, but without Advanced Search, I have a hard time finding my older posts I'm looking for.
 
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