Important Announcement Regarding Scheduled Downtime Monday 11pm April 6th A much needed hardware update is in the works, which in turn required that we update some of the nuts and bolts software that runs behind the scenes to make everything run. Which in turn required us to do some updating to the custom software system that drives this site.
We will be doing this in a couple phases. We've gotten through some of the required changes without disrupting the user experience (or if you're sharp-eyed and happened to load a page during one the split-seconds we happened to be actively working on something, you may have seen a test message here and there). The next phase will require we take the site down for just a couple hours to copy some data over to the new hardware.
We plan to do this at 11pm Pacific Time this upcoming Monday, April 6th, before the normal nightly downtime at 4am.
No problems are anticipated for this procedure. We've "rehearsed" it a few times, we just need to take the site down so no new data is entered while we are copying it over to the new hardware.
Thanks everyone for you support during these difficult time, and PLEASE STAY SAFE out there! These are scary times!
Apologies for the delay, we have been working hard to track this down.
First, to address some of the concerns that members of our community have expressed, we DO use SSL via a secure certificate directly issued by Thawte (do a Google search for Thawte if that is meaningless to you).
Second, we do NOT have any of your personal information. We don't even track or analyze browsing habits haha.
We obviously need to have your email address for recovery and alert purposes. But that is the extent of any information that we have about our users.
We believe is frank honesty, and to that end, we do not know what occurred. Nothing that we have seen during the course of investigation indicates that there is any sort of active security breach. It possibly looks like a very old breach from a few years ago, from what we are seeing.
None of your financial information has ever been in our possession, which is why we use third party processors that are much bigger operations with larger resources than we have.
We do encourage you to update your recovery email addresses (we suggest dedicated email addresses, they are free from basically any service on the planet) and updating your passwords just in case.
We will continue to investigate and report back. In the meantime, please enjoy the holidays!
Welcome to 2020 Unfortunately in this day and age, everyone is a target. Although we do not see any evidence of an actual data breach, based on feedback from the community, something has obviously happened and we are devoting all of our resources to resolving it ASAP. By design from the ground up from the beginning of this community over a decade ago, we intentionally do not house any of your personal or financial data.
We have multiple layers of security measures in play and even our own internal developers can't get into the system without being granted explicit access by us. But again, something has obviously occurred based in the community's feedback so we are looking at everything from the ground up and will report back ASAP.
Apologies for the inconvenience, and we are devoting all of our resources to tracking down the source of this.
Our host screwed up our certificate. But don't worry, we are working on get it working right now.
In the meantime, everything still working. You'll see some broken links here and there. We are working on a temporary solution while our hosting service fixes this.
If you get that error that the site is not secure, that is true. But since you are not sending sensitive our financial information, there's no much to worry about. This system was not using SSL (secure transfer) for a decade before we decided to go that route last year.
Gift Card Changes The Gift Card Company makes changes to the types of cards they accept and the $5 extra charge often.
They do NOT give us any advance notice or even tell us at all. We don't find out about the changes until we see a blog or get a ticket.
We just redid the page and stopped trying to show amounts and cards. When the gift card people change things, our payment page gets confusing.
The real key to it all is check the payment button BEFORE you go and buy a gift card. That way you know you are getting the correct card for the amount you wish to purchase. Check it every time! The card that worked last week might not work this week!
If you see anything on this page that needs corrections or additions or explained better please put in a support ticket.
Or use crypto! It really is fast and easy to do, and they don't charge the site 40% like the gift card people.
