I've just seen Eriba Forum UK is back online.

I took a lot of effort to track down all parties (Fast Hosts, Scala Hosting Etc. and Montrose Securities) to point out that something was seriously wrong. I would do the same Eriba Folk.

No further information so far on what happened but it seems a totally unusual event and my pressure on the relevant parties seems to have resulted in some form of action to restore things.

I've contacted the main man for the site asking what happened and if/when I get a reply that is not private I will update here.

I think this was asked in the disappeared thread and I didn't see an answer but what have Montrose Securities got to do with Eriba Forum. Googling the name brings up some sort of finance house with no apparent links to web hosting?

Well, I went and had a look a while ago and all seemed to be well....

No, you're not alone !

I'm still to fully understand what happened to the EribaForum and I'm not sure well will get a definitive answer fairly soon.

That said I have finally made contact with the site owner and now have his direct Email address if stuff goes wrong again in the future. For all site owners, e.g. Eriba Folk, you need to ensure that you have direct contact details with some trusted parties as only having contact details available on/from Eriba Folk site will mean that if your site is ever compromised people can get in touch with you directly. NOTE! Registrars / Hosting companies will ONLY deal with the registered owner(s).

Back to Eribaforum this is what I wrote to the site owner. Please note he was out of circulation so was not aware the site had been compromised / abducted / etc.

"Not only had it gone down. 1st it was all just blank on the Home Page and Forum. Then a week or so later a Montrose Securities page occurred on the URL and then later everything diverted to the main Montrose Securities site.

I used Nominet to lookup the eribaforum domain and found that Fast Hosts were the only the domain registrars so could not help. I then followed the IP address to the hosting parent company NS1 in Bulgaria. They could only point me to their Scala Hosting control page. As I was not the site owner there was nothing more they could do".

Anyway maybe me poking around with NS1 got them to take a look after I spoke to them.

I think in answer to Randa France's question "A simple question from one who does not know but is it now safe to enter?" then i believe the answer is YES!.

What I think possibly happened is that somewhere the relevant site and IP address and routings got screwed up thus sending site 1 to site 2. This view is reinforced by the fact that site 2 was no malicious and now the proper site 1 has returned exactly as it was when it went AWOL.

If I get any further details I will post here.

I will reiterate my point about all site owners should have a real private Email/other contact info lodged with other trusted parties and not just only available from their website. ONLY the site owner can deal with the hosting company and if the owner is on extended vacation / absence then if/when the site goes bad/AWOL then even moderators etc. are powerless to act. All anyone can do is to contact the site owner at their *private* email address.

As Randa and the hosting company say it is rare for "take overs".

Question to Randa. Have you authorised a couple of people (including yourself) to access and manage on your behalf the hosting account? Forum Admins / Mods will not have access or authority access your hosting account/portal.

I have professional hosting for FIVE domains. Not cheap but you get what you pay for. Anybody with a 24x7 PC up and running can do their own hosting but to do so you have to open ports, allow connections, etc. AND NEVER should a self hosting PC also be attached to your local private network because without extensive knowledge/experience and ideally separate pro firewall hardware between the network subnets your private/home network can be penetrated/compromised.