Hacked and Smacked

[PTEF-Nest-Janitor]

Turns out since the 19th of March or so (presumably) Russian hackers have taken down servers worldwide. I have every 3hr backups, dailies, weeklies, and monthly backups spread across servers in various countries. They took out everything BUT the monthly backups. We are slowly but surely returning to live.
I apologize for the disruption in service, and I am doing everything in my power to resume normal services, I am very sorry that we lost a month of content. But it is better than NO content.
Again, my apologies to all.

[Colin B]

Thanks for your sterling efforts to get things back up & rolling again !

[HillbillyCat]

First of all: Many thanks, Jordan! I can hardly imagine how difficult it must have been to get it (almost) all back together, especially as we are not the only affected website that you are taking care of! And of course you're absolutely right: losing a month's worth of content is better than losing everything!

As far as I'm concerned, a few extensive photo threads in particular are affected, which each took several hours of work to put together. It's almost impossible to reconstruct them exactly. I still have the pictures, but the texts in which they were embedded are almost all gone and the effort to rewrite them, re-sort the pictures for uploading, rename them and add their sources would be enormous... What I could try is to post almost everything again (including some photo contributions from others), but keep it very, very simple.

And finally: I'm angry at myself! A few weeks ago, after reaching 1000 posts, I had the idea to make a kind of backup of all my posts - just in case of a data lost like this one. I started it (unfortunately with the first posts, not the latest...) but then quickly lost interest and put the project on hold. Well, you learn from your mistakes: from now on I will archive all my new postings accordingly, that's for sure!

[John]

Turns out since the 19th of March or so (presumably) Russian hackers have taken down servers worldwide. I have every 3hr backups, dailies, weeklies, and monthly backups spread across servers in various countries. They took out everything BUT the monthly backups. We are slowly but surely returning to live.
I apologize for the disruption in service, and I am doing everything in my power to resume normal services, I am very sorry that we lost a month of content. But it is better than NO content.
Again, my apologies to all.

Thanks Jordan. I'm sorry you had to go through this as it must have been very stressful. I hope you can have a decent rest now.

[Colin B]

I wonder if steps have been taken to stop the evil Russians doing it again ?

[Colin.Bee]

Thank you Jordan for getting the site back up and also for your continued hard work which we all appreciate.

[Yin Yang]

This hack shows how vulnerable we are as a society.
Now we could not access Elvis information, but what if they hack the power plants? Railways? Hospitals? Food processing factories?
Anyway, good to see this site is back.

[PTEF-Nest-Janitor]

I wonder if steps have been taken to stop the evil Russians doing it again ?

Yes. It may sound extreme -- but the whole of Russia has been blocked. Along with anybody from Russia attempting to access the sites via a VPN (according to the product coordinator/programmers)

[Jupiter]

Thank you Jordan for all of your efforts. And it's super that the site is up and running again.

Jupiter

[Mike C]

Thanks, Jordan. Please get some rest.