An update for our community on the ongoing situation
You’ll have noticed that the forum and comments have been switched off for the past few week or so. Our forum is important to us and has always been a vibrant part of the sci-fi community. The current ongoing situation came about because an exploit was discovered in vBulletin 3.8.5 forum software, which we became aware of because of an attempted attack on one of Future’s other forums ( PC Gamer ). SFX runs vBulletin. To protect our users Future disabled all such forums purely as a precautionary measure.
– An exploit was discovered on a vBulletin forum on a Future site which was quashed before it could do any damage and reported to vBulletin.
– SFX was using the same vBulletin forum software so we’ve closed it as a precaution. We never want to put our users’ data at risk if it can be avoided.
– In the meantime we are (a) looking at upgrading the forum software and (b) reviewing whether to continue using vBulletin.
Please note that at this point Future’s IT security team’s investigation has revealed that no other user data has been compromised. Thanks for your patience. We apologise sincerely for any inconvenience this outage is causing the community, and we hope that SFX ers will find other ways to communicate with us (perhaps Facebook or Twitter ) until we are able to move forward.