Adult DVD Talk was hit with a ransomware attack in the early morning hours of March 16th. In order to get back online I had to restore from a prior backup. Unfortunately the only reliable backup I had available was from early February.
There's a lot of stuff that's still broken. I'm working on it.
Searching in the nav bar doesn't work yet, uploaded images are not displaying, uploads don't work at the moment. I will get to it all. I just need a little time to take a power nap. I've had about 6 hours of sleep in the past 3 days.
There's 223GB of forum image data copying from Google Cloud. It's going to take a while to copy 4.6million small files. Possibly 24 hours. Please be patient.
I realize everything is slow at the moment. It will get better.
I'm very sorry all this shit happened. I'm doing what I can to get everything fixed ASAP.
(reminds me of a time I had to reconstruct one month's worth of customer registration data at my company ... that were stressful 48hrs... But not due to ransomware, but sheer stupidity (and two backup levels not working properly, only the 3rd level, monthly backup, worked...)
Wow! I thought they would only go after businesses. It's not like a site like this would have millions of dollars to pay a ransomer. Can I enquire what they asked for.
Don't worry about the month or so of lost data; just glad to be back.
I get copied on those errors. I think it's fixed. It was indeed a caching issue, but inside the redis server that's used to track the CSRF tokens that the forum code uses to try to limit scripts inserting posts in the forum.
database indexes are being rebuilt at the moment causing database timeouts.
unfortunately the black bar is on the image. this won't be fixed until I can restart the server. and I can't restart until the file copy is done. I don't want to have to restart the copying.
I'm glad the forum is back on somewhat and noticed that a good chunk of posts and threads have gone, probably a month worth looking at the last posts stamps.
Not sure if this part of the restoration but will those posts come back or are they gone for good as it's a shame including that I've posted a few images in threads.
Unfortunately they are gone for good. I know it sucks but it's unfortunately the best I could do under the circumstances.
I've changed the entire structure of the network and backup mechanisms. It is a work in process at the moment but moving in a better direction that will enable me to recover more quickly without losing data in case this ever happens again.
The forum images copy is now 30% complete. 3.4M more files to go. I had to throttle the bandwidth dedicated to the copying because it was saturating the network and slowing everything down.
It's weird how different problems seem to affect different users. I can see some people are posting in the Star Crossed forum, yet I can't access it. Also, no threads I enter subsequently update to reflect I've read them. I'm sure it'll all come good in the end.
The speed of the site should be back to almost normal now.
Still restoring image uploads. 8.5 hours remaining. Then I will work on re-enabling all of the image upload features and automated optimizations that are applied after an image is uploaded.
At the moment I'm working on getting the navigation search bar functional again. Should be done in an hour or so.
"Many's the person missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it." 1939 Posts 8/22
Posted - Mar 20 2023 : 3:47AM
You are a God among men Drew, appreciate the effort getting things sorted. Had a problem with threads not updating but I cleared my cache and that seemed to have fixed it.
The avatar and image uploaders are working now. However, I still have to configure the post-upload-processing that creates thumbnails and mobile-optimized versions of images. I'm going to try to sleep for a bit and get back at it in a few hours.
The stuff that's visible to the public is less than half of what I'm working on. The whole system of importing data from the participating retailers needs to be reworked too.
Thanks for getting the site back up. Is the upload photos function working? It seems I can upload some, but in other cases it just refuses to work for no apparent reason.
If you registered as a new forum user between February 4th and March 18th you likely will need to clear your ADT cookies before the site will let you register again.
Sometimes life is goofier than a monkey on ether 12073 Posts 7/10
Posted - Mar 22 2023 : 1:15PM
Drew: Thank you for your hard work.
I have a question: When I go to the page that lists all the Forums I can see that new posts have been made in those forums but when I actually enter the forum and click on a thread I don't see any new posts. I have logged out and re-logged into my account but that didn't help. Do you know why this would be happening? Is anyone else having this same problem?
Oddly, this is the only thread where I see new posts.
Let me know if you're still seeing a disconnect between what's displayed on the forum summary pages and what's actually in the topics. I updated the cache control headers a few minutes ago and purged the caches.
I don't think it's related to logging in. I think it's possible that your browser has a cached page stored locally from the time when the cache-control headers were messed up.