Hi all,

A huge thanks to everyone who donated to the GPS Team Challenge fundraiser recently, it has allowed us to make plans to move hosting to make the site more reliable.

Speaking of reliability...

You might have come across some news articles recently that mentioned a massive exploit in PHP, which runs about 70% of the world's websites. Well, the venerable old gpstc website also runs on PHP. An old version. A very old version. An unpatched version. The threat from this exploit was so severe, that the server host shut down our website to prevent unauthorised abuse.

But fear not, we have had some work going on quietly in the background for the last several months. A very talented developer has been working to modernise the GPS Team Challenge, and had commissioned a replacement site for the GPS Team Challenge which was up and running a month or two ago.

So once this PHP exploit came around, we thought it best to just bite the bullet and move to the new hosting, with the view to switching over the website to the new version once the new version is fully tested.

I'm pleased to announce that gpsteamchallenge.com.au is back up and running, with extra bells and whistles coming soon.

I have to give a HUGE thanks to Dylan Tusler, who was a pleasure to work with over this process, and I'd invite everyone to thank him as well, as he is the reason that the site is back up again so soon.

Good winds,
Ben

The new site is up & running, it is way more responsive, It has been a pleasure to be involved, beta testing is under way on the new updated site, this has gone fairly smoothly so far.
Great work Dylan.

Great works guys😎

The Beta site looks awesome. I added a photo to my last post from my phone! I couldn't do this on the old site.

Are you going to add differentiation between fin and foil sessions?

I'd like to mention, as a couple of people have asked me, no I've not been paid for the work on the upgrade of the GPSTC site. I did it voluntarily to support a community I've been engaged with for the last 30 years. All the funds raised recently are for covering hosting costs to 3rd parties, not to pay me for my work (which would be far outside the budget of the committee.) I do exactly this kind of stuff in my day job, and working on projects like ka72 and gpstc are hobbies that help me develop skills I get paid for back in the real world, so it's a win-win as far as I'm concerned.

If anyone does want to recognize my personal effort, I'd encourage you to join one of the events on ka72.com (Hour of Power is open for entries now) or consider becoming a pro member there. I also accept any good quality spirits 🍸🍸🍸

Dylan