Now Dig This: Gene's Machine was once a PRON Site!

Sex sells! And I have proof! (My deepest apologies to those who were/are affected. In my defense: SOMEbody could have told me!)

In the beginning, Gene's Machine was simply a portal to The RPGaming Forums, an LCARS-Themed (think: Star Trek) set of message areas where certain gamers could let their hair down, transfer information, and generally plot and exchange ideas. It worked, so I was happy. They were happy. It also generated next to no traffic, and again, I was happy. Role-Playing Gamers (paper-and-pencil) aren't the largest slice of the Internet user base, which means that when I make changes to the site it won't adversely affect several hundred (or thousands) of users, especially if a change causes a system failure, which is possible when I'm at the helm. Smaller is better in this case.

It is also noteworthy to point up that - in looking for jobs, I found Drupal, and that is the web site you are reading from now. It is incredible, and I sing its praises both loudly and from the rooftops. I even found a way to "bridge" the gap between my web site and my Forums! This is exciting stuff! So I undertook the challenge, did what I was supposed to, and it worked. My happiness continued to abound. Traffic was still on the low end, and everything seemed to be brutally stable. Good. And the web site was now linked to the forums, so the casual user could navigate back and forth between them at will. Even better. Technology can be so wonderful, when it works. If you follow the correct procedures, Drupal is an incredible solid foundation from which to run your web enterprise.

Then I got busy trying to pay my bills and look for a job. Guess what I didn't pay too much attention to while all that was happening. Gene's Machine had sort of become my "pet rock", a test bed where I assessed the various mods, plugins, and extensions for the Drupal CMS (Content Management System) - my web page. So far so good. But I wasn't paying close attention to what other else was happening at all.

When I checked up on my traffic numbers, something had to be wrong: I was getting a tremendous amount of traffic - and I knew it wasn't gamer or game-related. So I whipped over to Gene's Machine to take a look. Sure enough, I had 3,690 different (identifiable) visitors at over 400,000 visits, moving over 8GB of data. Unless table-top RPGs had just experienced a renaissance, something had gone terribly amiss, here.

It was awful. Terrible. Several someones (not just a single entity: I have the IP address chain to confirm this) had hacked the forums and were using it for their various nefarious purposes, free web site hosting among them. They had even uploaded an entire porn website (latino/hispanic) or two for their viewing enjoyment! I found this because the Gene's Machine web site was dutifully posting the 'latest messages' in a chain down at the bottom of the Initial/Login web page - and - wow!

On the 17th of this month (August) I did a wonderful, terrible (horrible?) thing. I started to back up the gaming data from the RPFoums, decided it wasn't all that important, carefully removed the bridges between Gene's Machine and my RPForums, then deleted RPForums completely from the Gene's Machine hosting facility forever. Those few (gamer) individuals effected were no longer keen to visit anyway (the place having been overrun by raving pornlords) so they really didn't mind. It was sort of a mercy killing.

About Traffic: traffic went from a little over 8GB and thousands of hits to 1.2 MB and loads of autoscript hits. All of the autoscripts were trying to register bogus accounts on Gene's Machine (the Drupal web site). After getting eMails from the web site requesting registration for bogus accounts every two minutes for the last week, I installed an extremely-hated captcha security system on the login and registration pages. You can probably guess what happened, right? No more bogus requests! So Gene's Machine has gone back to being a nice, quiet (if marginalized) test bay. I may get another rendition of the forums going here, but I'll be a lot more careful as to what I put up, and how it will be managed.

I just thought it was interesting that Gene's Machine had, for about three months, become a pirates' exchange and pron site. A few of the new hacking attempts are impressive: the hackers are trying to "get behind the wall" of Gene's Machine, searching for forums that plainly no longer exist. I suspect that they believe I merely moved them to a more secure location, and that you need to be registered to access them. No such luck. But by the the time they read this, they should have long since discovered this. The data they had squirreled away on the Forums? All gone, with no backup. Yeah, that could mean that they've lost a load of really cool data (not to mention some pretty hardcore pron), but that's the risk you take when you use other people's wares for your own nefarious purposes. Guess they should've kept backups...