I know some folks prefer to stay in the SL and not venture out so I figured I'd better post about what happened recently.
Check out this thread for full details..
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/compromised-moderator-login-your-data-is-safe-though.697543/
But basically the site was attacked by a hacker who got into a moderator account with a weak password and deleted a whole bunch of stuff. The straight deletions were easily restored however he cleverly did mass thread merges and thread merges can't be automatically undone. The attacker struck threads that had recently been updated and unfortunately someone had just happened to post in the Civ2 Clone thread and the Civ2 UIA thread right beforehand resulting in the hacker seeing them and merge destroying them. Too many hours had gone by so we couldn't restore the site from a XenForo backup without loosing a ton of other stuff, so in the end a plan was devised to use webarchive backups to collect post IDs and then have a bot use the post ID list to retrieve all the affected threads posts out of the hackers giant mega merge dump thread. Webarchive didn't have full backups so a bunch of staff including myself had to painstakingly search the merge thread for more posts to manually move. The work continues but I think we have now fully restored the Civ2 clone thread and the UIA thread.. however unfortunately the old thread IDs are gone meaning any old links/bookmarks you have won't work and you may not get notifications in the thread unless you re-watch it (button in top right corner of thread or just post in it again to auto follow). We're making sure all staff have activated 2 factor and have strong passwords to ensure it doesn't happen again. No SL threads were affected.
Here's their new restored locations..
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/making-a-clone-of-civ-ii.697563/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-ii-mge-user-interface-additions-civ2uia.697565/
.
Check out this thread for full details..
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/compromised-moderator-login-your-data-is-safe-though.697543/
But basically the site was attacked by a hacker who got into a moderator account with a weak password and deleted a whole bunch of stuff. The straight deletions were easily restored however he cleverly did mass thread merges and thread merges can't be automatically undone. The attacker struck threads that had recently been updated and unfortunately someone had just happened to post in the Civ2 Clone thread and the Civ2 UIA thread right beforehand resulting in the hacker seeing them and merge destroying them. Too many hours had gone by so we couldn't restore the site from a XenForo backup without loosing a ton of other stuff, so in the end a plan was devised to use webarchive backups to collect post IDs and then have a bot use the post ID list to retrieve all the affected threads posts out of the hackers giant mega merge dump thread. Webarchive didn't have full backups so a bunch of staff including myself had to painstakingly search the merge thread for more posts to manually move. The work continues but I think we have now fully restored the Civ2 clone thread and the UIA thread.. however unfortunately the old thread IDs are gone meaning any old links/bookmarks you have won't work and you may not get notifications in the thread unless you re-watch it (button in top right corner of thread or just post in it again to auto follow). We're making sure all staff have activated 2 factor and have strong passwords to ensure it doesn't happen again. No SL threads were affected.
Here's their new restored locations..
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/making-a-clone-of-civ-ii.697563/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-ii-mge-user-interface-additions-civ2uia.697565/
.
