Hi all, new here hoping to provide some insights and learn who I can trust!

I joined Banners Broker a while back investing a small amount under pressure from a friend. But I'm glad I never touched it since because alarm bells went off when I read the technical excuses

I am an experienced web developer and also educated to a post graduate level in that field. The excuses they have given are anything but valid.

A denial of service attack against BB can't be mitigated by changing hosts. In fact, if a website is targeted the only real way is to make the cost of the attack greater or equal to the cost of being attacked. Anyway the attackers can simply find the new IP address ... we all know the domain name after all. That's all they really need to launch a Denial of Service attack. It was likely down because of server overload on their old shared hosting account.

The migration, like another user mentioned, is seamless these days. In fact, all they really need to do is to change the config file. After all they are using PHP and MYSQL. I know because they slipped up – I even discovered the framework they are using. At present they are doing there best to mask the framework thus it is possible they are having trouble as there is a lot of hard coding to hide. Although it is hard to verify, they had one major slip up and semantically the code is similar, just with changes to path names and default names. I'll keep everybody posted on the source code.

Another thing. Why would they cache people's panel pages? I know server caching helps the load but with 300, 000 affiliates you'd be caching individual tailored pages (eg. I have 10 yellow panels and Joe has 5 yellow panels). It defies logic. But if they are trying to cover their tracks, as I said before, they might be taking time to figure out how this framework works. Had they their own propriety system and dedicated I.T. Team this would not be a problem.

On that note, where is the engine hosted anyway? If the engine didn't move when the site was down, something tells me there's no need to reconnect them to work in harmony because they already exist on the same platform. I don't see any network traffic being exchanged other than google analytics and their own and yet panels are moving when they feel like it. Must be internal.

Or push button. I read somewhere from one of BB's biggest fans that panels rollup if you visit after not visiting for a while. What that means is that the so-called engine is triggered by people. Here is a quote from the classroom:

“The way it was working is that every time you go to the yellow view panel page, for example, your older yellows rollup, 3 at a time, each time you hit the page or refresh it”

What? Not even a cronjob!

And why do we have to wait 5mins for our banners to appear after upload? What are we waiting for? The time is already taken in the upload process. Why do we have to manually upload our BB banners that we have to advertise in the first place? Surely this could be automated. The default banners are already on the site.

I thought Chris Smith was both a mathematical and I.T. genius...

But then again, the target demographic are the less savvy, more vulnerable and older generation of people. It comes as no surprise that the new challenges are fairly tricky for this demographic. One lady I spoke to in her 70s was asking me how on earth was she going to blog as her final option. She knows nothing about it. Another did a blog and didn't even get enough to qualify a yellow!

But perhaps the biggest concern I have is identity theft. Why are we being asked so many security questions and being requested to hand in notarised forms along with consent to withdraw from our bank and our bank details? This information will come in handy when they can't voluntarily get your money.

Basic computer security states that you should only have as much access as required. Why do they need this overkill of information.

Just my two cents worth...