How can an internet- illiterate regain control of her site?
August 30, 2007 11:29 AM   Subscribe

Help! Local Coffee House's online community forum has been taken over by spammers & pervs! Can you provide easy to follow, clear instructions on how to take down unwanted posts?

Here's the deal; my former roommate (who has since disappeared) set- up this website http://www.rebeccascoffeehouse.com/index.html for a fixture of the community. Rebecca wishes to take back control of her site but doesn't know how.
She doesn't know who is hosting and does not have any administration logins/passwords. She was told that she needs to find her hosting service to cancel/switch so she can regain control.
I will give her this url so I'm looking for steps she can regain mod control. Please don't assume any knowledge.
You help is very appreciated. Here is the link to the forum and the posts are obviously NSFW; http://www.rebeccascoffeehouse.com/forum/
posted by thekorruptor to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
Looks like eleven2 is the web host (or at least the domain registrar), I'd contact them.

Registration Service Provided By: Eleven2, Inc.
Contact: *******@eleven2.com
Visit: www.eleven2.com

Domain name: rebeccascoffeehouse.com

Administrative Contact:
Rebeccas Coffee
Richard Rollo ***************@yahoo.com)
+1.8582201818
Fax: none
PO BOX 13052
La Jolla, CA 92039
US

Status: Locked

Name Servers:
ns1.eleven2.com
ns2.eleven2.com

posted by malphigian at 11:34 AM on August 30, 2007


Yep. http://www.eleven2.com/aboutus/contact/
posted by cmiller at 11:58 AM on August 30, 2007


Who is paying for the hosting? Is Richard Rollo the former roommate, or someone involved with the business?

If Richard Rollo is involved with the business, then it should be possible to take complete control over everything again with some effort.

If he is the missing roommate, this could suck.

Scenario 1: Business owner controls both hosting account and domain registration (even if they don't know it).

They should be able to gain access to the hosting account, which should put them in a position to take over administration of PHPbb, to clean it up, replace it with something with better anti-abuse tools, or shut it down all together.

Scenario 2: Business owner controls hosting account, but not domain registration.

They can take control of PHPbb as above, but will be at risk of ultimately loosing control of the site if roommate doesn't show up before their registration expires.

Scenario 3: Business owner controls registration, but not hosting account.

In this situation, they can redirect the url to another server and they can spider and repost their website, but they won't have any CMS features if they depended on server-side scripts for editing content, like the event calendar.

Scenario 4: Business owner controls neither registration nor hosting account.

Without cooperation of your old roommate, they can try to gain control of the hosting and/or the domain registration, but that could take time. In the interim all they'll be able to do is abandon the old site and try to establish a new one on another URL. They might be able to convince the web host to take the contents of that one down, and/or put in a redirect to the new URL, but it might require some lawyerly pressure.
posted by Good Brain at 12:35 PM on August 30, 2007


Once you do gain access to the server, simply delete the /forum/ directory completely. The forum software is phpBB, which is widely known to have tons of exploits and is suspectible to bots.

Here's how it works: People send out bots to every single website on earth, looking for a phpBB login page (my logs are filled with scans for the files). When they find one, their bot automatically creates and account and posts a spam message.
posted by mathowie at 12:59 PM on August 30, 2007


Here's how it works: People send out bots to every single website on earth, looking for a phpBB login page (my logs are filled with scans for the files). When they find one, their bot automatically creates and account and posts a spam message.

Wait, wait: I thought that was where ask.metafilter.com questions came from.

I keed
posted by davejay at 11:57 PM on August 30, 2007


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