Drupal vs proprietary CMS's: Soapblox hacked and gives up on it's sites

by Caleb G
7 January, 2009
Published in: 
Drupal
hosting
soapblox
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Just wow. Soapblox a proprietary/closed blogging CMS architecture and hosting combination, which has been widely used for left-leaning political blogs has been hacked and Soapblox is apparently throwing in the towel. What a mess:

It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

I imagine the soapblox site owner whom I talked to about migrating to Drupal (for nearly free, as I was supportive of what they do) a year ago or so, but never took me up on it, is probably wishing they had this morning. :-)

More information at this Kos diary. Might be a good opportunity for anyone looking to help out these kinds of sites by offering advice (or a hand) on how to get started with Drupal.

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 20:14

My understanding of the situation is that the serves were hacked and that the soapblox code was not the issue. The real problem is that the owner has been only charging $15 per month per site. So this was essentially a volunteer job, and that he has been fed up with late/non-payment from users recently already. So the amount of work to clean up this mess seems unappealing to him. But anyway he has updated the post:

I am nothing but a dramatic person.  I am
sorry for that.

SoapBlox needs help.  From all of you.  How do we salvage this.  How do we keep this going?

When you create something that becomes larger than yourself.

I apologize for being so dramatic.  Again, I have a knack for that. 

.

Also, there was a lot of talk of it going open source. I don't know what ever happened with that as I can't find the code anywhere...

Submitted by Caleb G on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 20:24

Well, there is the very real issue of the code itself in such closed projects, which won't see nearly the peer review that every line of code in Drupal core does and as such often IS more vulnerable (as pointed out by PHP creator Rasmus Lierdorf at OSCMS in Sunnyvale) -- but on top of that, and more to the point in this case is the issue of creating a dependency on something/someone that can just wave a white flag and give up.

As much as I love Drupal, Drupal.org, and/or the Drupal Association -- whether they continue to exist or not, I have no real dependence on them. There's a gazillion people that know Drupal to help out with anything, and it can hosted almost anywhere.

Submitted by Dave Reid on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 02:35

From the look of Soapblox, it seems like Drupal can pretty much do everything they need out of the box, but it seems like comments like "OMG steep learning curve" are blocking viable websites to try it out. I don't think you can ever put a value on a great developer community like Drupal currently has.

Submitted by Steve Hanson on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 15:22

I'm one of the few people running a site in the 50-state blog network on Drupal. Most of the sites in the network are on SoapBlox. We're staying on Drupal partly because I"m a Drupal developer, and partly because we think that Open Source is the right way to go for this, as well as using a more flexible platform that we can use for anything.

That being said, the SoapBlox sites are as far as I know all back up and running, and the developer and BlogPAC are working on a plan to fund SoapBlox more thoroughly, and perhaps to open source the code.

Still, a few of us really think that building a specialized platform like this is the wrong way to go in general - but SoapBlox IS a very handy and easy way for someone to set up a political blog. Just not my own personal choice.

Submitted by David on Sat, 01/02/2010 - 01:24

Unfortunately, most large scale companies, or communities, won't see it that way. They'd much rather design and fully own software than have it be partially in open source. It's just the way it is sometimes in business, they don't trust open source in part because they cannot own or sell it.

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