A quick announcement for all users. A small change will be made here at the end of September. This is intended to make it easier for you to use the forum and the callsign database.
Why does this have to happen? The law simply explained.
First, you need to know the history of the callsign database (from the former website) and the forum. Back then, the forum and the website with the callsign database were two separate sites.
The forum ran on a free host that offered the phpbb forum as a click&run forum. That is, one where you could create pre-made empty forums simply by clicking.
The website containing the callsign database, however, was written by Michael Rudloff's then friend and colleague (the forum admin and operator of the website qrz11.com). The website was written entirely in PHP.
I (yours truly, Christian, aka Chris1278) joined later when the forum had problems with the free host. We were just able to save the forum, and Michael now runs it as a "clean" installation on a web space. Since then, I've been on board as the forum's technical administrator. This means we have full control over the forum, unlike with the free host (free hosts often have limited administrative options).
That's why it was already a problem. Apparently, it was possible back then to register more than one user account in the forum with one email address. This isn't a problem in itself, but it did become problematic during the planned change. I'll come back to that later.
Then, at some point, Michael's friend and colleague, who programmed the website (not the forum), passed away. At Michael's request, I agreed to take over the callsign database project as well.
When I looked at the basic code (PHP), I discovered that the website's programming had numerous security vulnerabilities.
Since the PHP versions themselves increased over time and changes were made to the core, unfortunately, errors kept occurring on the website.
I fixed these relatively quickly, but it became clear that it wasn't a permanent solution. So I consulted with Michael, and we quickly decided to integrate the callsign database into the forum and then set it up as a single unit.
That's why I had previously entered all the callsigns into a separate database table and also added the users to the PHPBB forum via script. Since I couldn't assign usernames there, I decided to temporarily use a randomly generated sequence of numbers instead of the usernames. Since you can log into the forum with your email address in addition to your username, this seemed like the simplest solution. And then I simply linked the users and the corresponding callsign entries with a hash value.
Linking this to the forum offered several advantages. The registration checks and the handling of the forum's background processes were already much more complex and sophisticated than was the case on the website. We also wanted to ensure that you shouldn't have to worry about data security and the secure handling of this data when entering your data here. However, please note: There is no such thing as 100% security. But we can and want to at least do that and provide the best possible security in this regard.
So, that's the status of the process so far.
The following changes will be implemented at the end of September.
- Users with more than one email address will be completely deleted. This means that the forum users, along with their associated callsigns and entries in the callsign database (if any), will be deleted. It will still only be possible to use an email address once.
- The users I integrated from the old callsign database website via script will also be completely deleted, along with their entries in the callsign database.
- The forum user table will be cleaned up.
The reason for this is the following innovations coming soon.
The links between the entries in the callsign database and the forum, which were previously secured using a hash value, will be established using the user's user ID.
In short: Until now, when a user wanted to edit their callsign, the forum always knew that the connection to the callsign database was established using the user's hash value. So, for each user, a sequence of numbers is stored in the table as a so-called hash value. For me, for example, this would be the sequence of numbers 1672713998, which is also contained in the callsign database entry. This way, the forum knows which entry the user wants to edit.
Now, however, it has become apparent that some people are having trouble understanding how this all works. Since the forum is the main system and the callsign database is part of it, it is currently not possible to write entries directly to the callsign database during registration. Many people assumed that they had to use the call sign as their username, which would then be stored directly in the call sign database. Unfortunately, this isn't the case.
This will change in the future, however. Once all the cleanup work and updates to the call sign database are complete, you'll be able to enter your call sign when registering. So, you can still freely choose your forum username (if it hasn't already been used), and it won't be entered as your call sign. However, you can also enter the five call signs when registering. This should make things a bit easier for you. You can then enter the remaining information about your call sign in your personal area of the forum.
But for this, we first need to clean everything up and make a clean break. So that we're in a clean slate again.
Users who are deleted in the process can then re-register at any time.