The 2d Cavalry Assn News Center

Dateline January 25 2007. The Association News Center has returned. After several months of downtime due to a security incident on the site we have returned with a new suite of software and a whole new modern look for the site.
So now its time for a bit of history….

1994 (I think) the site was started by Bob Dobson (whom still owns Dragoon Base over on the MSN network) And to be honest I’m not quite sure what he was doing with it for a long time because I wasn’t involved in the Association at the time.

2000 I came on board the RS-5 (Reed Museum) as a web technician as the Regiment sorely needed a web site and somebody found about my skills in the area and I was “volunteered”. Not that I minded. RS-5 was a great place to be and I learned a lot.

2001 the Association took control over the dragoons.org domain and web site from Bob Dobson whom at the time didn’t have the time available to maintain the site any longer. The site was handed over to me and I accepted the task of “running with it”. And run I did. By 2003 the Assoc web site was a fully featured Portal that not only provided the basic Association news it also connected members to each other, provided historical data, weekly articles from The active regiment, and other tidbits of information from the world of the Military. However all of this technology driving information came at a cost and the software we used was often so new that it hadn’t been tested. There were bugs.

2003 the software packages I had installed on the site had been patched, fixed and in some cases removed and the site matured and evolved into a suite of features that closely followed the majority of our “consumers” desires. Life moved on and things settled down for the Web staff as we focused more on providing articles and content rather than new features.

2005 the time had come for me to start looking for some newer software to drive the site or the assistance of a programmer whom was willing to donate time to help maintain the code base that drove all of the News Center’s features. Because as those in the web site industry know Web Servers never stay the same forever and sooner or later their software gets upgraded and the clients have to follow suite. I didn’t get too far and at this point the spammers started showing up.

2006 the spammers attack the guest book. Our guest book was in a few weeks filled with literally thousands of ads selling Viagra and other supplements. I was forced to disable the guest book. Next to fall was the Locator. We soon had hundreds of fake members listed with names like Mr. Buy Viagra and Prozac Baby. It too was disabled.

October 2006 the site was hit by a hacker that was able to access the core software using an unknown bug in the software to replace the front page of the site with a political message of his/her own. At this point the entire server was taken offline for a period of time whilst I was in contact with the Web Hosting Company. After a period of time we decided to restore the server after disabling all of the dynamically driven content of the Association’s web sites. Over the month of November I restored all of the web sites (e.g. history center, Adjutant’s site and member sites) and left the News Center offline.

March 2007 our status is as follows:

The History Center is 100% operational

The Adjutant’s Site is 100% operational

Member’s sites are 100% operational

The News Center is 100 % operational functional under a totally new software program. However there have been some changes some are good and some are bad.

The Locator: Has been removed and will remain offline for the forseable future until such a time that there are resources available to deal with the never ending horsed of spammers on the web trying to sell us pills…

The Guest Book: Has been revived for now.

Membership: This for the most part was a function of The Locator. It has been disabled for the public at large. However the public at large is able to post comments on the site on any article that they desire and NO registration is required. The system is still moderated meaning “I’m watching” so the efforts of would be spammers will be largely un-noticed by the public at large.

The News from years gone by: We have articles of interest dating back to 2001 that are in the older database from the previous software suite. I still have all of this data and am working on a solution to “pull” this data forward and somehow integrate it into the current site’s org structure.

To summarize.

We are back, things have changed, and things are continuing to improve.

Isaac Golding

Webmaster

Second Cavalry Association Inc.