Earlier in this thread I posted pics of what was displayed when going to CPF. I initially thought someone hijacked their site.
Here is why.
CPF has always, as far as I know, done their own redirect. The first screen you see when you go to their site is this.
Some browsers were giving the warning of an unsafe site. Those that didn’t, displayed a page with these instructions.
To me, given the circumstances, looks like a phishing attempt to get CPF users to send email and passwords to a rogue site.
Remember now, that page is a redirect. Whether or not it is a legitimate page is by now very suspect. At least it was to me.
Perhaps it was suspect to some other browsers like Chrome. I would imagine that Google uses algorithms to detect fraud, and perhaps the combination of the redirect and the text above set off an alarm.
Chrome reported this.
That redirect and request of email and password and a resave could be what triggered all this.
At the very least, I think a site that redirects you after a pause is in just poor taste. Just as audio would be.
When I type in a URL, I want to go silently to the site I typed and nowhere else.
Those sorts of redirects are very common and are not what triggered this situation. The redirect Google (and others) are worried about was to a third party website that claimed to be some sort of file hosting/sharing service. Redirects within a website’s own domain are common and harmless.
That said, the way CPF does that is really not the best way to do it. First, its pointless. Just a waste of time. If the webmaster really can’t figure out how to get the forum software as the site root (which is what I suspect to be the issue) then just do a simple and immediate header redirect in the index and be done with it. No need for drama and pauses.
The reason for that is simple. A large number of the early ex-pats who fled here from CPF did so specifically because of how they were being treated by the powers-that-be on CPF.
Remember the recent anonymous rant here about how BLF has become too bourgeois & lost it’s focus on uber cheap lights?
Well imagine if instead BLF had a single thread were you’re allowed to post about any light that costs more than $10. That is how it was on CPF at one point. If If anyone posted about a super budget light, their thread was closed & they were told to take it to the ‘proper thread’.
Finally the admins grudgingly created a subforum for budget lights which was then quickly ghettoized.
There were a lot of toes stepped over at CPF. On the bright side that behavior is part of why we have BLF & it also helped spur the early rapid growth of the community here. You could even say that we owe CPF a debt of gratitude for showing how not to do things.
Yes the CPF bashing gets over the top at times & can be annoying….but people also need to understand that there were real issues that gave birth to those negative feelings.
That being said there are also some great folks on that board & there are plenty of threads that are worth their weight in (virtual) gold.
“Oh it isn’t us. It’s Google. Nothing to see here!”
Any problems are always externalized. You’re having issues? Well it’s probably your own fault. /thread closed.
The redirect was real, it happened to me shortly before the site was blacklisted. The denial & trying to shift blame perfectly illustrates the issues that some have with CPF.
That blue icon is the vbulletin forum software icon. No conspiracy, nothing nefarious going on. CPF probably updated the software on the server and have not yet got around to reinserting their custom icon.
Robert Mazur A very, very, very minor and insignificant difference!! The original CPF Icon is no longer displayed on my desk top. It looks like a Gray check mark with a small horizontal extension encapsulated in Blue!! Did I describe that well?!
Like · Reply · 10 mins
Vincent Tseng
Vincent Tseng I think that’s the generic icon for vBulletin - the forum software. I get that as well, been that way since bypassing the red screen
Like · Reply · 4 mins · Edited
Robert Mazur
Robert Mazur ok,it looks like a customized “V” also! Thanks!
Like · Reply · 4 mins
Kelly Dreller
Kelly Dreller Vincent is correct. I need to go through and fix a couple of little issues like that now that the major stuff is taken care of. The yellow lightbulb should be back within a couple of days.
Just out of curiosity SB, would what happened to me be a redirect that has been talked about here. The dialog box just came up out of the blue as I was already logged in and going to a new topic.
Nope, it’s nothing out of the ordinary, just trying to load external resources. The browser loads the webpage immediately with whatever is available, and doesn’t wait for external references to load. So for example your browser loads a thread on CPF, most of which is pulled off CPF’s server and is readily available, so you see the posts and forum layout etc, but after a few seconds the external image requested from ToyKeeper’s server reports that it isn’t available because it’s restricted, so your browser pops up its authentication box so that you can access the image if you knew the username/password.
The redirect issue that people are discussing here is completely different, where they entered candlepowerforums.com in their browser’s URL bar and get redirected to nefarious.tk (fictitious) in the URL bar.
Tried to open CPF on different browsers several times since yesterday with no luck. Is it still there? Or is it permabanned from www?
I also tried to open all Selfbuilt’s reviews, nothing showed.
Nahh, its been very unreliable for me today too. Working one minute; gone the next. Their server/hosting solution isn’t the most robust option, I think.
