IPB 1.3 Concern/Question

I am looking to open a forum and my budget covers hosting (not vB or IPB license). So my choices are limited.

My question is, if I apply these fixes/patches on this site to IPB 1.3 bare, how secure will my forum be from "intruders"?

http://forums.invisionize.com/index.php?showtopic=75148

Thanks!

I don't need a definate answer.

Do any other people run this version of IPB?

Theoretically, should those patches work?

Hmm maybe. I used IPB 1.3 on a couple of sites and even after patching them, one of my forums still got hacked. They can somehow insert malicous code (a hidden iframe) into the source code that loads an external url and tries to make all visitors download a virus! The safest option is to just buy a license. I think IPB 2.0 is only about $70.

A good forum about IPB is http://www.invisionize.com

I installed IPB v 1.3 on my website in January 2004 with zero problems... until this month. I've had the iframe hack 4 times so far this month.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening?

Is there anyway to determine the IP Address of the user/bot making these posts to ban them from accessing the forum?

Is there any way to alter the copyright tag so it does not display the version?

I also never had an issue with spam postings or registrations for 2 years and this summer all of a sudden i started getting 10 spam registrations daily.

What happened, and how can this be stopped?

Has anyone found a fix to this problem yet?

This is extremely annoying because this is just a small forum for a small group of people yet some goon keeps hacking it the past two months and its making all of us not want to log in anymore because we never know when its going to be hacked again.