Hi All,
As I am sure all of the watercolour haven members are aware, the site has been having problems recently, possibly due to previous priviledged users (i.e: people with complete access to the site) who wish to undermine the spirit of watercolour haven.
Regardless of whether the problems we have been experiencing are due to the users who have previously been given a place of trust within the haven community or not, the problems are all related to the security of the site. As there is the possibility that these problems may be related to a previous event caused by someone who was part of the technical team running the site, there is no way to be certain the site is secure in it's current state.
Due to the above, I have decided the safest way forward with watercolour haven is to backup all of the current content, completely wipe the site and rebuild it from the ground up with security as the main concern. Once this is done I may restore previous artwork/forum posts, however, as I am sure the loyal members will agree, providing a safe and secure community has to take prority.
In terms of time, I'm not 100% sure when I will be able to reactivate the forums. While installing the software that runs the site again is a trivial task, making sure that we are secure takes a little more time and patience. I would hope that we will have a secure site up and running towards the end of the month (June '08) - please check back here frequesntly for updates which will follow this message.
I would also like to reassure all of the watercolour haven members that, from a legal point of view watercolour haven has done nothing inappropriate or immoral. The site is owned by a single person and any work performed on the site, whether paid or voluntary, does not entitle the person that carried out said work any rights to ownership of the site. Of course, in accordance with the end user agreement, all works of art posted to the site remain copyright to the artist who created the work, however this does not have an influence on the running of the site.
With regards to the person(s) who are currently causing problems with the site, purposely affecting the site in this way is in violation of the the computer misuse act [1990] or the equivelant in their native countries. All of the logs from the site are currently being mirrored off site by myself and evidence is also being gathered by the hosting company (Westhost). While I personally don't think legal action is currently the correct way to pursue this matter, if the offences continue it is unlikely we will have little choice apart from taking this course of action.
In closing, we wish the members who uphold the spirit of watercolour haven all the best over the next few weeks, keep painting and we look forward to a (secure) return soon!
Regards,
Haydn and Watercolour Haven
Update - 09/07/2008 14:30:
Hi All,
Sorry this page has been unavailable for a while, there was an issue with the DNS servers associated with the domain. i.e: The domain name watercolourhaven.com was not resolving to the IP address of the web server. This has now been resolved (obviously!) and work can continue on the site.
The server has been completely reinstalled although there is still a fair bit of work to do before we reopen. As most of the moderators are away until the end of July we will probably be looking to reopen at some point in August.