Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

I have been unable to access the site for several days.  (I kept getting a message that the server was not responding.)  I was finally able to log in today but a lot of my information is incorrect, almost like the pages were reset to like a couple months ago.  Books are not marked read, reviews are missing, books I removed from my reading list are back on the list, etc. 

Is this a known issue that is being addressed or do I need to try to fix everything?

Our host suffered a malware attack and had to shut down all their servers and move all clients to new machines etc. They used a backup of those sites and data to avoid moving the malware to the new machines.

Not sure what the next steps are but we're looking into it. For now I'd say stand by before you starts re-entering your data. We may be able to update the DB from our own backup. Chris is researching. Unfortunately there's not a ton we can do while we're at work so the solution may have to wait until we get home this evening.

More news as we have something to share. Thanks for your patience as we try to get back on our feet.

A2 is apparently restoring service in phases so we're crossing our fingers that they'll come back round to us and we'll get more of our data back.

As of now I suggest we stand by for a few days to see what happens before we attempt to restore anything that could get overwritten with a more recent backup.

At this time I’m not sure what’s going to happen but here is what we hope to be the case with the very limited info we have. 

The site has gone up and down several times since it first crashed so clearly they’re still struggling to fix things. We’ve seen data from 2 different backups at least so we know they have some options as to how far back they can go. This current version is from the third week of February. 

We know from what they’ve told us that they’re trying to bring their machines and clients back up in stages. We are hoping that they’ve picked a known good date before anyone’s data was compromised as the first reset and that they will come around in the next stage to update their clients to the most recent backup that is safe on a case by case basis.

We have had no indication that our site/data was actually a victim of the attack. It seems more likely that we got taken down, along with most everyone else, to stop the spread of the malware. If that is the case we shouldn’t lose a lot of data though I suspect we’ll lose at least a week’s worth at least since their backups are weekly. 

There’s a lot of speculation in that but that’s the best we have at the moment. A2’s not doing great in the communications department so all we can do is stand by while they sort things out.

I’m trying my best to be optimistic right now because I don’t like to suffer the worst case scenario until it becomes a fact. That is getting harder and harder as this goes on. I keep finding new ways in which we’re going to be royally screwed. It’s very frustrating and please believe me when I tell you that we feel your pain.

For right now we’re going to try and be patient as things work themselves out. We are trying to get more info and will pass along anything we can as soon as we can. Keep the faith friends. We’ll get through it one way or another.

Still holding at the moment. We put up a temporary info page late last night here:  http://www.worldswithoutend.com/notice.asp  and added a link in the sidebar.

We have a backup from March 31st that will be going up soon and we'll let everyone know here in this thread when that is complete. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for the kind words. It’s a horrible mess for sure and the site keeps going down which adds more uncertainty to the process. We’ve got to get away from this dumpster fire so we can rebuild.