Morpheus
06-25-2009, 02:03 PM
Hello HSG'ers. I felt it necessary to take a break from my work and give everyone an update to what has transpired and what is currently going on. For those members who aren't on the site every day, they may not know what events transpired over the past 5-6 days, and popped on one day this week to find a drastically different site, and may not know why. So i wanted to take this opportunity to give a brief summary of the state of the site.
What Happened?
Over the course of the past 2-3 months, our site has started to experience a series of hacker attacks that have caused site outages and databases corruptions.
Two weeks ago, an outage occurred that corrupted approximately 7 days worth of site data. So 7 days of posts and topics were wiped out. Even the members that joined during that time frame (about 20 of them) were wiped out. The site was brought back up (minus the 7days of data) and stayed online for about another week. Then the last outage happened, the morning of Saturday, June 20. This was the worst of all of them in that it completely wiped out the entire Member database! Luckily because of my recent paranoia about the site, i had been locally backing up the data every few hours. So the loss was minimal, yet still very frustrating as you can imagine.
Always been on my mind.
For the past 6 months, upgrading our community has been a priority on my mind, and wanting to make that move had nothing to do with any outages or site problems. The previous software that we were on had some nice features and served our needs, but there was so much more power that could be taken advantage of by upgrading to some of the premium softwares that were out there. So, my eyes have always been set on migrating the site to one of those best-in-class community programs.
Making The Move
The PROPER way to have done that migration to the new software would be to set it up on a test server, move over test data to it, and begin to test all of the fucntionality. Then apply the same look/feel/skins to that test server. Then take a few weeks to have a group of members or staff beta test it to make sure everything is functioning and to everyones liking. This entire proecess would have taken approximately 4-6 weeks.
The Decision
With the increasing consistency of the site outages, apparently getting worse, more time consuming, and costly each time they happened, I had to make the decision to cut-bait with that platform/software immediatly. I did not have the time or resources to continue to poor into a software that had an "incurreable disease".
I took the site down, put up a maintenance notice on the website, I and proceeded to obtain and install the premium forum software.
Ideally, i would have kept the maintenance notice up for 7-14 days so that I could properly get all of the data imported, all of the proper staff permissions up, all of the themes and skins imported over, etc. So that when the site was reopened, members would not notice much of a difference and would be relieved to be "back home".
However, I felt that our community, being down for that long of a period, would do much more harm than good. So, i chose to simply complete the import of data, add 2 generic themes, and then get the site back up and going. And then proceed to work out all of the details along the way. The site was down for approximately 36 hours, from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon.
This is why there was such a different look feel when everything came back up. Of course i added a second theme for you to choose (use the dropdown menu at the very bottom of any webpage to change your theme).
As most of you can tell already, this new platform is massive, and has 100 times the features that the previous software had. Neither I nor anyone on staff here has had the 4 weeks of training on this new platform that I ideally wanted us to have, so that we could intelligently assist all of the members with the transition. We have all been "thrown into the fire" so to speak, and are learning as we go. I ask that you be patient with myself and the staff as we are working to regroup and get things back to normal.
To answer a few of the quetions that many of you may have....
the original theme WILL be coming back.
you should now be able to add your avatars.
check the event boards for any rescheduled events that were to start this week.
If you are having problems with your account, PM me or one of the staff members. I am not doing much casual browsinig/reading of the forum, as I am currently neck deep in working on the backend of the site. So any discussions that may be addressed to me, i most likely have not seen them.
Thanx.
Morph.
What Happened?
Over the course of the past 2-3 months, our site has started to experience a series of hacker attacks that have caused site outages and databases corruptions.
Two weeks ago, an outage occurred that corrupted approximately 7 days worth of site data. So 7 days of posts and topics were wiped out. Even the members that joined during that time frame (about 20 of them) were wiped out. The site was brought back up (minus the 7days of data) and stayed online for about another week. Then the last outage happened, the morning of Saturday, June 20. This was the worst of all of them in that it completely wiped out the entire Member database! Luckily because of my recent paranoia about the site, i had been locally backing up the data every few hours. So the loss was minimal, yet still very frustrating as you can imagine.
Always been on my mind.
For the past 6 months, upgrading our community has been a priority on my mind, and wanting to make that move had nothing to do with any outages or site problems. The previous software that we were on had some nice features and served our needs, but there was so much more power that could be taken advantage of by upgrading to some of the premium softwares that were out there. So, my eyes have always been set on migrating the site to one of those best-in-class community programs.
Making The Move
The PROPER way to have done that migration to the new software would be to set it up on a test server, move over test data to it, and begin to test all of the fucntionality. Then apply the same look/feel/skins to that test server. Then take a few weeks to have a group of members or staff beta test it to make sure everything is functioning and to everyones liking. This entire proecess would have taken approximately 4-6 weeks.
The Decision
With the increasing consistency of the site outages, apparently getting worse, more time consuming, and costly each time they happened, I had to make the decision to cut-bait with that platform/software immediatly. I did not have the time or resources to continue to poor into a software that had an "incurreable disease".
I took the site down, put up a maintenance notice on the website, I and proceeded to obtain and install the premium forum software.
Ideally, i would have kept the maintenance notice up for 7-14 days so that I could properly get all of the data imported, all of the proper staff permissions up, all of the themes and skins imported over, etc. So that when the site was reopened, members would not notice much of a difference and would be relieved to be "back home".
However, I felt that our community, being down for that long of a period, would do much more harm than good. So, i chose to simply complete the import of data, add 2 generic themes, and then get the site back up and going. And then proceed to work out all of the details along the way. The site was down for approximately 36 hours, from Saturday morning until Sunday afternoon.
This is why there was such a different look feel when everything came back up. Of course i added a second theme for you to choose (use the dropdown menu at the very bottom of any webpage to change your theme).
As most of you can tell already, this new platform is massive, and has 100 times the features that the previous software had. Neither I nor anyone on staff here has had the 4 weeks of training on this new platform that I ideally wanted us to have, so that we could intelligently assist all of the members with the transition. We have all been "thrown into the fire" so to speak, and are learning as we go. I ask that you be patient with myself and the staff as we are working to regroup and get things back to normal.
To answer a few of the quetions that many of you may have....
the original theme WILL be coming back.
you should now be able to add your avatars.
check the event boards for any rescheduled events that were to start this week.
If you are having problems with your account, PM me or one of the staff members. I am not doing much casual browsinig/reading of the forum, as I am currently neck deep in working on the backend of the site. So any discussions that may be addressed to me, i most likely have not seen them.
Thanx.
Morph.