TL;DR version: we’re going to be emailing out new login information to everyone. This is part of migrating to a more secure login system. Expect to receive the email in the next few days.

Several weeks ago, we had some evil doers hack into various parts of our site. Thanks to having our database on its own server (and several other security measures) nothing was taken, but it did alert us to something annoying – The version of VBulletin we’re using doesn’t support the latest version of PHP.

In order to help keep things secure and take advantage of the latest versions of PHP and mysql, we’re migrating our software to use a new login system, and introducing a new chat area. The existing forums are being maintained. We’re just separating forum logins and logins to our science programs. This will allow us to upgrade the forums without worry about breaking the science logins, and allow us to expand what we can do with our science programs without being constrained by VBulletin.

We will be emailing everyone their new logins for the science apps when we have everything up and running. We’re hoping things go smoothly, but we ask for your forgiveness if there are some periodic missing features during the migration.