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VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

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Page updated Januaray 28, 2004

Information: Programs, security, viruses. January 28, 2004.

Just like a cell has a surface and allows certain materials to be transferred through it, your computer has floppy drives and network connections. During the last week starting Sept. 5, many users started experiencing very slow connections to VoyForums. We started working to fix the problem immediately, and find the source of the sudden slowdown. We found that web connections were seemingly getting "stuck" after initial connection to the web servers. However, some people were experiencing no problem at all, and to add to the puzzle, other types of transfers, traceroutes, and pings were fast. Through process of elimination, we upgraded server hardware, updated software, installed, reinstalled, reconfigured packages, and narrowed down the possibilities until the source was found. Interworld.net, an upstream provider from us had problems with overloaded core routers because of all the worm traffic caused by faulty and insecure email clients. The routers affected were restricting web traffic to downstream connections, including many other clients aside from us. The reason why everyone was not affected and why the symptoms were so hard for us to diagnose was because people's routes are different and not all routers were going through the afflicted routers. We worked with them as they fixed the problem. A side effect of the attempts of finding the problem and doing the diagnostic upgrades is that now speed is faster than ever.

Last week was a frustrating and trying time for all of us. We appreciate the patience, support, and cooperation of our admins and visitors this past week as we sorted out this problem, even as it was not on our end.

What can you do?

The most important thing you can do is to stop using Email Clients that don't put your privacy and security, and that of the whole Internet, as a priority. The sobig worm has caused $29.7 billion of economic damages alone, including our own losses this last week, monitarily and to our reputation. It is really beyond irresponsible that software designers would program in automation autosend of messages and running executables on view.

We strongly advocate the use of safe Email Clients which will never autolaunch nor execute code on reading an email.

There are a few such email clients which may be suitable alternatives to poor programs which are vulnerable by design.

Remember that we have a News page where important notices are often posted.