[thelist] phpBB hacked and Crystal Tech isn't being very helpful

[Christie Mason]

From: Joel D Canfield
considering what I'm experiencing, I find it interesting that Appliedi
promotes phpBB too.

[-CM-] One person's "promote" is another person's "provide".  It's my
impression that all/most hosting services tend to *promote* that which is
popular, especially if it's free.  I have also seen all/most hosting
services *promote* trial/limited versions of fee based software.  I've never
taken it as a recommendation of that software, just a marketing ploy.  

Appliedi's been through the fire with me on several occasions over the
years, especially the injection situation which was an old code not updated
situation - not the fault of the hosting service, and they've been rock
solid for years which is the basis for my recommendation.  I have a
suspicion that one of the reasons they haven't done the $4 a month/10 domain
type accounts is because that price point tends to attract noobs and
hobbyists. It's never made sense to me that any company would want to
attract a market that requires the most handholding and exposes their
servers to high levels of risk at an unsustainable low price like that.

As far as IPB http://www.invisionpower.com/hosting/index.html - It looks
like they're headed towards becoming a CMS by starting from their forums,
which is interesting.  Ugly URLS.  Only allowing their clients who have paid
them $ to read the forums is a negative.  I look at a vendor's forums to see
what type of problems and types of responses are occurring, especially in a
"pay me or I won't let you see what's behind my curtain" scenario.   I don't
know if they realize that search results are not restricted and links to the
posting authors work just fine, which probably isn't a good idea and really
makes me question their security processes.  Search with a date range
doesn't work.  I got results from 2007 when start date was 1/1/2009.  My
impression is that they're doing a good of monetizing their efforts with an
attractive site that talks the right talk, limited direct support while
hoping their community stays active enough to do their ongoing support for
them.  They feel very like many of the .Net vendors I've reviewed.  Hook you
in with one module then try to upsell you to additional modules while
offering limited support.

I have a cynical distrust of applications that want me to pay for their
software without an opportunity to checkout their code, templating and db
setup.  It seems like the more you pay, the less opportunity there is to
really explore the backend and I've been burned too many times to buy into
that process, unless I have no other options.  I don't expect free but I do
expect to see what I'm paying for before I hand over the $.

Christie Mason