Firstly welcome back (or just welcome if you weren't with us before).
Just over a month ago we were attack with some malicious code. This found its way into many areas of the boards and resulted in a lot of people being re-directed away to various other sites (including porn sites, and malware infected sites). We closed the boards hoping to be able to sort out the issue with relative ease and have the forums back up and running on a new server with new software (myBB was a royal pain in the rear) as quickly as possible.
We ran into issues. Lots of issues. For a start, because we didn't have access to the server that the site was running on (as it was on the same one that GTAForums.com runs on) we were very limited in what access we had to download the current data. This held us up for quite a bit as we tried to get the data through other means. Additionally, the backup utility that was built in, aside from being relatively poor, was also infected with malicious code. In the end we had to get each table separately and troll through it to remove the malicious code. Eventually we seemingly had all the data back. All we would need would be to put it onto a fresh install of myBB on a server we controlled and we'd have the site back. All we would need to do would be convert it to the new software.
Unfortunately, like the rest of it, it was not as simple as that. I could not find a server we had access to that would allow the conversion to finish running. It would time out the process after only 20% of the way through. This was probably caused by the large size of this forum, the conversion tool was probably not designed to handle such loads without dedicated servers running just for that process.
In the end I had to manually design my own code (through seeing what the conversion tool did) to build up the new database for which we could run on. However this had a few problems with various parts we could not replicate. These will be outlines in a "Known issues" topic.
Rest assured that although we still have a long way to go to get the forum where we would like it (a lot of mods to put back on) that we are on a much better footing now. On this software and this server we have a huge amount more control than what we had before. I ask you to give it time for the forum to get back up on its feet.
I ask that you read through the topic of Known issues within the Site suggestions & Bug reports forum. This contains an explanation on a lot of the issues we still currently have that may be concerning you.
Topic: Welcome back ***PLEASE READ*** (Read 1673 times)
