by arclight » January 4th, 2013, 4:44 am
One minute the forums are creaking along like the Marie Celeste, a briny ghost ship of a thing, then suddenly everyone is getting a scary ZOMG! UR IP ADDRESS IS BANNED!!1!.
My Batphone lights up (it's a cricket bat shaped like a phone) and I mutter a few obscenities in ancient Aramaic before logging into the server to see if I can resuscitate the forums from the new year's first dirt nap.
Nothing obvious pokes out of the filesystem to indicate the forum's been hacked. That's a relief, and knowing how old the forum software was, it is also a miracle, a bona fide strolling-across-the-Sea-of-Galilee turning-water-into-wine casting-demons-into-a-herd-of-swine miracle.
Poking at the database, there's no obvious culprit there either. No indication why forums just suddenly shit the bed or even how to clean the dook off the comforter. However, there were about 13,000 users and I know damn well that you and your friends don't amount to 13,000 people. I generously accounted for invisible friends and voices in people's heads and I still couldn't believe 13,000. So after about an hour of deleting about 11,000 spam accounts I was ready to pull the trigger on some software triage.
Bang.
The forums have been migrated to phpBB3 in an utterly craptastical emergency fashion. I believe I accidentally deleted one real person's account in the process (sorry), but aside from that, all the forums, posts, avatars, etc. are intact. There are backups of the old system so nothing should have been lost. 'Should' is always the operant word, so if you see anything utterly wonky, let me know. The best way is to ping me at @arclight on Twitter.
Again, apologies for the outage. I've added reCaptcha to the login process to hopefully keep the swarthy hordes of grifters at bay and I'll look for replacement or updated plugins for the ones left on the old system (mainly the internal banner ads and antispam stuff. Suggestions for features are welcome, as always.) This is also a good time to ask if anyone can put together some pretty graphics to make the forums a bit less ... generic. My first goal was to get the patient breathing, so again, apologies for all the blood. I hear Tide works wonders on bloodstains. Either that or club soda.
For the curious, I believe the root cause was some indigestion or staleness in the cache (translation for non-technical people: rutabaga creosote viscosity Albania saturated recombinant pleather drag coefficient) but it doesn't matter at the moment because the crew is ashore, the boats have been burnt, and like Caesar's legions in Britain, there's no going back. Bon chance!