Website Issues!

[Shockwave]

  Welcome back to DBF!

This is not the first time we've had a serious issue with the site and this probably won't be the last time either. 

Due to the nature of computing and the internet there is no way you can ever fully protect yourself against malicious people or software and hardware failures, you can take the best measures possible though and to that end I have learned from past experiences.

As for what happened, it's really quite impossible to guess.. It would be true to say that we were on an older (but not ridiculously old) version of SMF, but it's open source and it's popular which means people are trying to make exploits for it all the time - So it is possible that someone found a way of corrutping our database.  More likely though, is that something else corrupted the database, which is what I think happened, especially if a process was writing to it and it was being restarted.... Though the chances of this type of thing happening are small, these things still can happen.

After the incident with Hostpapa where they deleted our site and my backup had been made in ascii, I made sure we were on a host with automated backups.  Xilo has this service and our site and all it's databases get saved in the early hours of each morning.  Getting us back up and running should have been simply a matter of me rolling back to the last backup, however when I tried to do this I quickly realised that we had missing data... There were corrupt tables which were stopping the database being rolled back.

I repaired the tables and I then raised the issue with Xilo because there were missing posts, they've worked very hard to restore as many of the posts as they can, there may be some missing but there won't be many.  The private messages on the other hand have all been lost and there's nothing I can do to get those back.

I've run a lot of tests over the database, I've also updated the forum software to the latest version & have taken full backups of everything before my update in case I need to roll the site back.

I can't tell you how gut wrenching it was for me to see the site crashed like that... Obviously you all know I've retired myself from coding intros but I regard you all as my friends and this community has been around for over a decade. I want DBF to remain online for as long as people have a use for it and I apologise for the delay in getting it back up!

Anyway, welcome back and hope you carry on enjoying the site

Shock

Ps: Please also use this thread to report any issues that you find when using the forum and I'll do my best to fix them!

[Gore Motel]

DBF is back, yay!

[combatking0]

Your efforts are most appreciated

[jace_stknights]

  dbf is still alive!!! Thanx you for you work! 

[Knurz]

Glad you're back 

[spitfire]

This is great news! I was getting worried.
Thanks a lot for your tireless efforts.

[Ampli]

welldone, Ampli says Hej Kompis.

[Dr.Death]

Great news mate 

[Kirl]

Woot, thanks Shockwave! 

[edit] removed embeded little game/demo thingy, kind of annoying sounds when reading the thread.

[ttemper]

Glad it's back 

[Jim]

Fantastic job Shockwave!
Jim

[relsoft]

Wooohooo!

[KrazyK]

Thanks for all your hard work. 

[Moroboshisan]

Shockwave: there's no words to express how much your efferts and dedication are appreciated!!! thank you so much!!!

[Shockwave]

Unfortunately some motherfucker out there is playing with us.. I don't know why.  If the site goes down, please do me a favour and mail me at my gmail account and I'll fix the site.
Now I know what is being broken it's very easy for me to fix - just annoying that it keeps happening.

I'm working on finding the exploit that is being used, when I find it I will patch it but please rest assured everything is backed up every night.

[Dr.Death]

Your doing a good job mate just a shame its a silly little prick messing things up 

[Shockwave]

Thanks Paul...

It's about time I did some more work here anyway so it's making me look at the source for the first time in a long time at least

Jake is asking me to teach him how to code too, he's still a bit young (7) but I want to make sure that DBF is still here when he does get started again.

[Kirl]

Unfortunately some motherfucker out there is playing with us.. I don't know why.  If the site goes down, please do me a favour and mail me at my gmail account and I'll fix the site.
Now I know what is being broken it's very easy for me to fix - just annoying that it keeps happening.

I'm working on finding the exploit that is being used, when I find it I will patch it but please rest assured everything is backed up every night.

As a wise man once put it so eloquently in the shoutbox: "Invader, get you the hot bullets of shotgun to die!" 

[Yaloopy]

Fuck off shithead script kid.

Thanks for your work, Nick.

[Raizor]

Nice one for getting it sorted again Shockwave. I can imagine it's pain a right pain in the arse to sort out

K++