FIRST Forums shut down! [back up, now]

[DonRotolo]

Seen today when accessing the FIRST Forum:

Dear FIRST Community: Recently, many of the online User Forums within the FIRST community were hit by an increase in ‘spam’ to the extent that we have taken our forums offline to protect our students and the entire community. Forums will be unavailable until further notice while we supplement our current filters with increased protection. All of our FIRST social networks and forums strictly adhere to COPPA laws. However, as the nature of social site content changes over time and as new sites and users are constantly introduced, we will need to adjust content filter software to protect from new inappropriate content, users and their changing tactics. If you are aware of any issues on any of the FIRST forums, blogs or social sites please contact customerservice@usfirst.org or call us at 1-800-871-8326, Extension 0. Thank you for helping us to ensure the continued protection of all FIRST students and the entire community.

[willson.thomas]

That has been up since Thursday I believe. See Bill's Blog.

[The Lucas]

Looks like they work now

[Tom Line]

Yeah, recently hackers in Russia released a suite of utilities that breaks the "Captcha" (the image you have to type letters from to prove your human). If you use other message sites on the net you've probably seen the same thing unless they have moderation enabled so the posts don't show up until after an admin has reviewed them.

[Roger]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

...recently hackers in Russia released a suite of utilities that breaks the "Captcha" (the image you have to type letters from to prove your human).

Heh -- I wonder if their using the new 2009 controller camera that does shape detection (discussed a little here). Makes me wonder if the Russians used Kevin Watson's camera code back when it came out. "Is wonderful, comrade! But why does spy camera follow green light?"

[AustinSchuh]

Could we rename this thread to state that the forms are back up? Every time this thread comes up, it makes me think they are down again ......