hikarateboy

Hey everyone, Quick update on the connection problems some of you have been hitting, especially the "I tried to post pictures and the site timed out / booted me" issue on the forum. I know this has been frustrating, and a few of you have gone out of your way to let me know exactly what you were doing when it happened. That detail is genuinely what let me track it down, so thank you. What was going on: one of our security tools was misreading normal activity as suspicious. Posting a batch of images to a thread, in particular, was tripping it — the more pictures you added, the more likely it was to lock you out for a while. It was never anything you did wrong, and your accounts were never at risk. It was an overcautious filter, plain and simple. What I did: I found the exact setting causing it and corrected it, so posting pictures to threads should work normally again. Our real protection against actual threats is still fully in place, I only turned off the part that was falsely flagging regular members. What you should do: just carry on as normal. If you were locked out, you should be back in. Go ahead and post those pics. If anyone still runs into a timeout or gets blocked — especially when uploading images, please let me know, and include what you were doing and roughly when. If it helps, the site or your internet provider may show you an IP address; that's handy for me to pinpoint it, but no worries if you can't grab it. Thanks for your patience while I chased this one down. It took a few rounds to fully corner it, but I think we're in good shape now. Cheers, Ted

Hey everyone, Some of you may have run into trouble reaching the site recently — pages not loading, getting timed out, or being unable to connect at all, sometimes for a day or more. We tracked down the cause and it's now fixed. What happened: One of our security tools was being a little too aggressive. It was designed to block suspicious activity, but it misread some normal, everyday browsing as a problem and ended up temporarily blocking real visitors by mistake. If you were affected, it had nothing to do with anything you did wrong — you just got caught in an overly cautious filter. What we did: We identified the exact setting causing the false alarms and corrected it, while keeping our real protections fully in place. The site's security against actual threats hasn't been reduced at all. What you should do: Nothing, in most cases — access should already be back to normal. If you're reading this, you're through. If you know someone who was still having trouble connecting, ask them to try again now. If anyone is still blocked, have them reach out to me directly with a rough idea of their location or internet provider and I'll get it cleared right away. Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the hassle.

Yes. Lots of fixes underway. Specifically, emails sending from the site. What a nightmare. If you weren't getting them before you should now. if you need a password reminder please request. It should be working now. whew! that was a tough one. I will be looking at blocking issues for some users tomorrow. That said we will be moving to Xenforo board sooner than later as it should address some of these issues. Admins have been testing and we will open up to all for a test before resyncing posts and switching over. I would love to have that done by this time next week. Thanks for your patience More to come.

We've identified and resolved an issue where some members were being blocked from accessing the site entirely. Our automated security system (firewall) was being overly aggressive and accidentally blocking legitimate users who triggered too many false positives during normal browsing. If you were unable to access the site and it suddenly works again — this is why. You've been unblocked. The security thresholds have been adjusted to prevent this from happening to regular members going forward. If you're still unable to reach the site, please have someone pass along your IP address to an admin so we can check. You can find your IP at https://whatismyip.com. Regarding email notifications: We've also resolved an issue with outgoing emails (password resets, notifications, etc.) not reaching Gmail and other providers. If you previously requested a password reset and never received it, please try again — it should work now. If you're still not receiving forum emails, please check your spam/junk folder first, and let us know if the issue persists. — Ted / HFC Admin

Closing this one and opening a new one that will be pinned at the top.

Thats also good information. The good news is I have upped the monitoring game and set a few traps but so far the security hardening Ive done has been successful. I will look at that traffic though. thanks!

a { text-decoration: none; color: #464feb; } tr th, tr td { border: 1px solid #e6e6e6; } tr th { background-color: #f5f5f5; } Need More Details About Thread Popup/New Tab Behavior RE: report that the following thread may be opening a popup or launching a new tab/page unexpectedly: "Cool pics you took or ran across, or just plain wtf's?" I have not been able to reproduce the behavior myself, so I need more information to track it down. If you're seeing the issue, please reply with: Desktop or mobile? Browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc.) Are you logged in or viewing as a guest? Does it happen every time or only occasionally? What page of the thread were you viewing? What exact URL opens in the new tab/window? A screenshot if possible. Also, please let me know whether: The new tab opens immediately when the page loads. It happens after scrolling. It happens after clicking an image. It happens after clicking anywhere inside a post. The more specific information you can provide, the faster I can isolate the cause. Thanks for helping track this down.

This is a great report. PLEASE keep these kinds of things coming! Thanks to Mathman as well.

They sure tried, but we are not out of the woods yet. Been watching all night and so far so good. Lets hope they got bored and went home. Keep your eyes peeled for weirdness and let me know right away if you see anything

a { text-decoration: none; color: #464feb; } tr th, tr td { border: 1px solid #e6e6e6; } tr th { background-color: #f5f5f5; } Hello everyone, I wanted to provide an update on the recent interruption and the work that has been taking place behind the scenes. Over the past several days, the site has been operating in a restricted access mode while I worked through a security review, cleanup, and infrastructure recovery process. As part of that work, a number of outdated components, unused software, and legacy items were removed, security controls were strengthened, and the server environment was rebuilt and tested. The good news is that the core site, forums, content, and member data remain intact, and the site is steadily returning to normal operation. What Happened? The server showed signs of unauthorized activity that required a thorough investigation and cleanup process. Out of an abundance of caution, access was restricted while the environment was reviewed, repaired, and hardened. At this time there is no evidence that forum content, member posts, or historical discussion data were lost. What Was Done? Among other things: Security controls were strengthened. Several unused or outdated components were removed. Legacy software that was no longer needed was eliminated. WordPress and related components were updated and cleaned up. Additional monitoring and alerting were put in place. The server environment was rebuilt and tested in a restricted-access mode before returning to service. What You May Notice Over the next several days you may notice: Minor visual changes on portions of the site. Navigation or menu updates. Theme/layout adjustments. Temporary issues with less frequently used features as they are tested and restored. Occasional maintenance windows. If you see anything that looks broken, missing, or unusual, please report it rather than assuming someone else already has. What To Watch For Please let me know if you encounter any of the following: Login problems. Missing pages or content. Broken links. Missing images or attachments. Forum posting problems. Account permission issues. Unexpected redirects. Anything that simply "doesn't look right." The more specific the report, the faster I can investigate. Thank You I know interruptions and maintenance periods can be frustrating. I appreciate everyone's patience while I worked through this process. The goal has been to make sure the site remains available, secure, and reliable for the long term. Thank you for sticking with HamerFanClub. — Ted

Hi Folks, After beating my head against the wall trying to fix a known migration bug effecting attachments in IPS for more than 20 hours. I decided to cut my losses, purchased, installed Xenforo and migrated all of our current data to it. It took a while but its been a SUCCESS and attachments work in the new forum! I'm in the process of validating the content and configuration with the help of Chris Matthes and Kiz. Once that is complete, I will open it up to everyone in parallel to the current board for further testing. Once we confirm its all good hopefully a few days. I will reimport the data from the current forum and swtich us over to the new one. All your ids and log in information and groups (supporter) should work in the new forum. Thanks all for the patience. Its been a journey but I can see the end in sight!

Hi Folks, Sorry about the delay in fixing attachment upload. I wasnt able to sort it immediately after go live on new server and work has had me away from home for last 3 weeks. I have some time off over weekend and going to dive deeper. That said I had mentioned that IPB has been turning the screws trying to get us to subscribe and so I am looking at moving to Xenforo which has a much more reasonable licensing model. I am also looking at that this weekend and moving to the new software might make more sense than fixing attachments in IPB. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for the heads up on the photo upload. I will look at that asap. Hopefully I will find the issue quickly. I appreciate you all.

After tons of hours and thousands of co-pilot messages (amazing really) to figure out the new host created a broken VPS. The site should be back and better than ever. Beat it up and let me know what you find. That said. IPB message board we use has become bloated and is bugging me to constantly buy updates and move to their cloud services. It's to the point that I am ready to jump to another forum product. I am not planning on doing it this week. But likely in the future. If you are interested check out xenforo, its lighter weight, has a very similar feature set and much more appealing licensing. Thanks all for your patience. I appreciate every member of the first and best damn guitar forum on the internet for over 30 years your friend Ted Martin For those that have no clue what I am referring to see the back story here:

For those that arent aware, we are moving hosts. read the thread below for details. To make that happen I need to freeze the database for the messageboard to migrate the data. Its massive 2+ gigs and will take a while to export, migrate and test. If all goes well, knock wood, we should be back up, id say within hours but its gonna take a long as its going to take considering the snags I have run into so far. Hopefully not a day or more. We should come back online in the same board you are used to. HOWEVER, IPB is getting aggressive about licensing and moving people to their hosted solution so I am looking at forum options. The front runner is xenforo, its similar but a bit less bloated and much better licensing set up for self hosted. Just a heads up thanks for the understanding

Good News! I have a reasonable host and am in the process of setting things up. Fingers crossed it goes well. I'll keep you posted. So far, its been a grind, but so good. Cant wait to ditch this crappy host

Hi Folks, First off this is not a plea for money, I appreciate all the support that people send, and I plan to keep the HFC going until it doesnt makes sense. Feel free to read as much or as little of this as you like but I wanted to be transparent on whats going on. As many of you may be aware we have been struggling over recent months. Our hosting company was sold last year and things continual are getting worse. The service being the most obvious as you may have noticed frequent 503 errors due to them reducing the amount of resources available. They have also increased our hosting prices by over 300%. furthermore, the plan we are on no longer works for us due to the resource demands from the board and the only option for staying is Virtal Private Server which cost exponentially more than of a traditional shared hosting account or offloading the board to invision cloud hosting but that alone is over $1000 per year and I dont want to lose the other pages. This really maked me miss the old days when I hosted the HFC on a throw away 386 running linux and apache in the basement of my inlaws office. Anyway, over the last few months I have been trying to find a situation that was reasonably affordable. I am planning to move hosts and am close to narrowing down my choice. The initial costs are reasonable as they give you a deal for a year then increase your monthly the next year. One of the issues is the size of the database as I have been retaining ALL posts from when we first moved to invision 20 years ago. I like the idea of having them available to search and revisit. However, I might need to drop quite a few or them. If I do, I will keep a copy and maybe bring it back up under an archive site. We'll see. I am working on keeping the recent stuff going first. What you need to know is this migration is going to happen soon, likely in the next two weeks. The site may be down or unavailable for a while as I migrate data. maybe days but I am hoping to avoid that. Please give me some grace on that as I do have a real job as well which has been very heavy. Lastly, I want to thank each and every one of you for being here. YOU are the HFC not that site and I am going to do my best to keep this clubhouse going as long as I can. your friend Ted Martin

Nope thats the right venmo. When ever you send support please include your screen name so I can reply with a thank you online and know who should be upgraded to supporter status. That said I will be starting a new thread shortly about some changes specifically to our hosting and the impact on the board. Stay tuned.

Oh and if you do send support ensure that you include your screen name to make sure that I upgrade you to supporter! Its hard to tell who is who from email sometime.

Thanks to all for the support. It really goes a long way. For those wondering, it goes toward the message board license and hosting fees. As mentioned in another thread, we have been bumping up against shrinking resource restrictions from our host and I have been working to find and setup more economical options to offload some of the strain. Thanks again. I appreciate you all.

Thanks all for the kind words and encouragement. I've been watching the stats as attachments moved to S3 storage and I am hoping that it will make a difference. Of course the moving of data, while automated, has been very Sloooooooooooow. Day 2 and counting. I've not done the Zelle thing and honestly don't know where to start with that.

Hey All, You may have noticed that the HFC has been experiencing some performance issues lately. I did make a change today to move attachment storage to amazon s3 to help take some of the load and hopefully that's a good first step. As with many things these days, the hosting provider we’ve used for the past decade was sold, and the new owners are placing more restrictive limits on resources. The goal seems to be pushing customers into higher‑tier, and significantly more expensive, plans to maintain performance. On top of that, the cost of our existing service has increased to the point that I briefly considered returning to the 1990s, when I ran the HFC from a server in my basement on a dedicated line. Invision does offer a hosted option, but it comes with a significant annual cost and doesn’t include the base site. Determining the best path forward has been a challenge. Before jumping to any conclusions, this is simply a plea for understanding as I work through the options, not a request for donations to cover the cost increase. I’m trying to keep expenses low to ensure the long‑term future of the HFC. Many members have generously donated in the past and continue to help, and I’m grateful for that support, but right now I’m focused on exploring alternatives. It may even be that, after nearly 30 years, it’s time to move on, or let one of the existing private Facebook groups take over the discussion. That said, I know many of you are knowledgeable and full of great ideas. I’m an IT manager by day, but my teams do most of the magic now. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how we might move forward. The HFC is important to me, and I know it is to many of you as well. I’ve known many of you for nearly 30 years, and I’m not giving up, just wanting to be transparent. Let’s work through this together. your friend, Ted Martin

The biggest part of the reason the HFC has been the best damn forum on the internet for 25 years is because of the quality of its members as well as the mods. We also don't trust algorithms completely to validate that those registering actually are people! As such, the mods spend a good amount of time manually reviewing registrations. There are often cases where the registration looked fishy due to ip location, username, email address or muck rakers trying to access via second accounts. If you feel that your registration validation is taking too long, feel to reach out via the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page. Let us know who you are, your username, what email you used to register, and what brought you to the HFC and we'll take a look.

I was contacted by her husband who was trying to gain access to the site and while approving his access i also found the old post and moved it to in memorium as that section didn't exist when first created and that action bumped it

Annette (2/16/65 - 8/12/16) started at Hamer Guitars in Chicago while in high school and remained with the company until it relocated to Connecticut. As anyone knows, products are a direct representation of people who make up the company, so if you are a fan of Chicago era Hamer Guitars she can be thought of as part of the reason why.