Ok folks, here's the update:
I take virus threats very seriously - especially those that could affect our visitors. I will not allow this site to infect anybody's computer, and have - and will - do whatever it takes to ensure the security and privacy of our members. In the 14 years we've been on the Web, we've only had one incident that was corrected immediately.
About six months ago, I tried a different ad network for only a few hours, and they did deliver an ad containing malicious code. So I removed the entire network immediately and have never used them again. This was an isolated incident that affected 9 members. BassResource has never had such an issue before or since.
Along those lines, we scanned the site for malware and didn't find anything. As for the server having a virus, this is not the case. There are there no known viruses in the wild for linux (only a dozen or so have been written, and none of them work on updated machines like ours).
That said, we're still going to run a scan on our entire server, but it will not likely find anything, and the scan will take as long as eight hours to finish. The scan will also drive the load on the server up significantly, and will cause the site to slow down. So in case you experience slow load times, now you know why.
Some of you have hinted that it's a virus from an ad. Google and Microsoft are pretty good about keeping malware from being delivered through their ads, so I'm not sure that's the issue. It's certainly possible, though. I have been in contact with both networks and they are looking into it.
This is more likely a script error on the forum software. We have examined this error in the forums and in the backend. We rebuilt the indexes and examined the databases (about 10 times now). I don't find any errors or problems on the server. Neither I nor the host provider have changed anything recently on the server.
I have also been in contact with the developers of the forum software. They are looking into the sheer size of membership and posts as a possible issue. It's possible we may have hit an upper limit somewhere that is causing the error. It seems to occur only when we have a lot of folks logged in at one time, so they're looking into that as well.
That's all I have for now. Again, if you have any more "virus alerts", please pass along as much information as possible. But please understand it's unlikely there are any real threats to be concerned about. I would have shut the entire site down already if I had any reason to think there was a possibility of infecting your computers.
Glenn
