I brought this up to my friend Robb R. down in Florida not too long ago. I am a computer guy by day and a bit familiar with this stuff. I repair vintage computers and arcades and stuff as a hobby and fall into the data hoarder side.
Does anyone have credentials to the site outside of the owner? I think the owner still has a year left or more in the clink?
All these forums get attacked non-stop by spammers and automated attacks trying to steal the user databases (logins and encrypted passwords.) I would imagine it has hit that site hard and broken it. Hopefully there are backups and the posts table wasn't dropped by an exploit?
I see my private messages over there but not the forum contents. It has been broken for a wihle.
If someone else has admin credentials I'd be willing to help you fix it for the sake of preserving it.
I had sent them an email before he went to prison and all of a sudden the forum started working again, but then it quit a bit of time after it.
I am worried that it's on some shared hosting platform, the billing will fall behind and it will get wiped out. (Update: It's hosted on HostGator.)
More Updates:
No CVEs exist for vBulletin 4.2.5, so that seems like a good thing:
Security vulnerabilities of Vbulletin Vbulletin version 4.2.5 List of cve security vulnerabilities related to this exact version. You can filter results by cvss scores, years and months. This page provides a sortable list of security vulnerabilities.
www.cvedetails.com
It's possible the reason why it's broken is the host has moved forward on the versions of the PHP parser, and the code from 4.2.5 is incompatible with it.
