Someone has hacked the forum :(

[Jon]

We have had a bit of a problem with the host in that we started with them about 7 years ago and they have a very basic control panel. Most hosts give you something like cpanel which will also have phpMyAdmin to help administer databases. This host had no such thing. No control panel to speak of.

This made making backups of anything very difficult. I couldn't even tell the size of the database or anything. It was only with a special request and going through many hoops that I could get a backup at all. In any case, I got a backup of the database last year. It was about half a gig.

We used the structure in this backup to get back some of the posts. It was done by the vbulletin support team. However, I reckon there are still the other posts in there but we can no longer get them since they used the structure definitions in my old backup to regenerate some of the forums. So, the data is losts.

My intention was to change hosts, but like lots of things in life, it was left on the back burner.

My future intentions for this site are to:

1. Get it upgraded to the latest versions to reduce the change of future attacks.

2. Change all passwords for administrators and moderators.

3. Maybe create a front page for the forum that will give statistics of posts etc.

4. Generate some of the popular missing forums e.g. Excel, Word and so on.

5. Start a post to discuss what other forum topics would be useful for this site.

This whole experience has been very upsetting for me as it represented 7 years hard work, the loss of invaluable knowledge to many and serious damage to the community here. No doubt we will lose lots of members as a result.

However, I want to rebirth the forums and hope something good comes out of it.

 

[ColinEssex]

This whole experience has been very upsetting for me as it represented 7 years hard work, the loss of invaluable knowledge to many and serious damage to the community here. No doubt we will lose lots of members as a result.

However, I want to rebirth the forums and hope something good comes out of it.

Jon

Rest assured that many of us longer term members will not desert the forums. As questions pop up we will soon build up a useful fount of Access knowledge.

You know there is a hardcore of regular experts who will support you and the forums - I for one appreciate the hard work you've done and will do my best to help build up our wealth of knowledge - I think I also speak for the others too.

Hang in there mate

Col

 

[Oldsoftboss]

Jon

Rest assured that many of us longer term members will not desert the forums. As questions pop up we will soon build up a useful fount of Access knowledge.

You know there is a hardcore of regular experts who will support you and the forums - I for one appreciate the hard work you've done and will do my best to help build up our wealth of knowledge - I think I also speak for the others too.

Hang in there mate

Col

Ditto Col,

I have a couple of folders that I keep various code snippets and sample Db's

I will go through them and post as many neat, relevant bits I can.

Dave

PS. This forum has helped me so much over the years, I feel privileged to be able to put something back

 

[Oldsoftboss]

But I still have my avator

 

[bat1799]

I may have only been here for a year but I have enjoyed my participation and will contine to try and answer question

Peter

 

[dent]

I would like to offer my deepest sympathys to all involved in running this forum. Its a fantastic resource and for beginners like myself its worth its weight in gold, I for one would pay for a resource like tihis. Why would anyone want to attack such a specialised and inocqueous site like this, WA**KERS!!! I hope something can be done to catch or stop this happening again. Again my sympathys and my continuing support to all.

 

[ghudson]

Amazing how one gutless bastard can cause so much damage to an informational and knowledge based site such as the Access World Forums. I have copies of every database sample file I have ever posted and I will do my part and repost my contributions when time permits.

I do hope that the previous forum sections can be restarted for I thought each section was very useful and proportionally sectioned. But I think that we need to wait until the forum as been upgraded to prevent another hacking from destroying the rebirth of the Access World Forums.

For the time being I guess that I will have to refrain my classic (Searching the forum is a great way to discover and learn the answers to your Access programming questions ;-) since most of the links are dead because many of the original pages were hacked and deleted.

As another poster recently mentioned... You can google and find many of the older threads by clicking the "Cached" link to the google thread. As an example I googled for this text string "ghudson Browse [Find a directory or file]" and google returned this "dead" link Access World Forums - Browse [Find a directory or file] I clicked the "Cached" link below the found thread and google returned this old version of my original thread. http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:...udson+Browse+[Find+a+directory+or+file]&hl=en Unfortunately the cached pages from google only go back to 11/25/2004 and the attached zip file links do not work but that is better than nothing. I have made numerous improvements to my Browse [Find a directory or file] thread and the posted sample but I will repost an improved version I have been working on once the "Samples" section of the forum is created.

One thread "section" I hope that will quickly be built is the common sense [decency] that a poster should follow before posting a question. Too many questions that have already been posted and answered are previously been posted within the forum. Granted that many of the older threads and knowledge this forum used to have been hacked and deleted. Maybe a request [private message or new posting] process can be made so that dead links can be edited. That might help those who actually use the forums Search functions and prevent the new [and old] members find the answerers to their questions.

 

[reclusivemonkey]

Firstly, let me say I do not condone in any way what has happened here. However I am quite surprised that no one has suggested you leave politics out of a technical forum; this my have nothing to do with recent events, but personally I found some of the comments appearing in the Watercooler to be racist and extremely offensive. IMHO, if you allow things like this to be discussed on the forum, you won't find it long before you attract this sort of attention again.

 

[WillEllis]

The only area I can seem to access threads is the new posts page. Is the page with the list of areas gone?

 

[seth_belgium]

I don't know about the possibilities of vBulletin forum software to create your own database backups. I know that the option exists in the populat phpBB-package to create a txt-file of your entire database whenever you want to do it.

This must also exist in this forum, so it might be a good idea to create regular backups since you can't count on your host to do it for you.

 

[shades]

Following ghudson's approach, I have gained access (pun) to several Excel threads to which I posted. If that is helpful for Jon, I can give you a link.
________
HONDA BATTLE OF THE BANDS

 

[yippie_ky_yay]

Firstly, let me say I do not condone in any way what has happened here. However I am quite surprised that no one has suggested you leave politics out of a technical forum; this my have nothing to do with recent events, but personally I found some of the comments appearing in the Watercooler to be racist and extremely offensive. IMHO, if you allow things like this to be discussed on the forum, you won't find it long before you attract this sort of attention again.

I haven't been here in a while so I haven't read any recent posts to which you are referring, but I don't need to - freedom of speech! And if that is the reason for it, then that person has essentially admitted to not being smart enough to defend themselves verbally.

My guess is that a real hacker probably posted an exploit for vBulletin and some Script Kiddie (a kid who thinks they're a hacker but really just follows the instructions and runs code written by someone else) picked it up and went searching for a forum that uses it.

Anyways, best of luck with all this Jon! I'll be around more and try to contribute where I can!

 

[JRJR-]

The only area I can seem to access threads is the new posts page. Is the page with the list of areas gone?

I had the same issue with both IE and Firefox. Finally I created a new account here on the forum and when I log in with the new name it works just fine.

 

[Rich]

but personally I found some of the comments appearing in the Watercooler to be racist and extremely offensive.

Where ?

 

[selenau837]

I was having the same problem, not being able to log in except through threads I had subscriptions to. So I went to my options screen and changed my forum skin to use Forum default. It then let me in.
I didn't have to recreate my account.

Also, I am still a newbie so I am not able to contribute as much as I would like, but I do love using the forums. They contain wonderful information, and have helped me throughout the past months. As I get more experienced I will contribute more, or at least try to.

Lastly, it also, helps with my grammar/spelling since there are a few grammar police on the site. However, I did this post fast, so I apologize in advance and hope those 'grammar police' don't slam me too hard.

 

[ChrisO]

G’day all.

I don’t know if this will be of any help but it seems that data may not have been totally lost.

If I go into my, or anyone else’s, profile and select all posts and then select last page it goes to the 20th. Page. The restriction seems to be on pages not exceeding 20 or posts not exceeding 500. Now with different people the date of the oldest post will change so it seems that the restriction is not on date.

Perhaps all the data is still there but we just can’t see it. Maybe the site software has some restriction that limits viewing to the last 500 posts???

In any case, if you want to retrieve something from the last 500 posts of a member it looks like you can do that via their profile.

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Chris.

 

[jrjr]

I was having the same problem, not being able to log in except through threads I had subscriptions to. So I went to my options screen and changed my forum skin to use Forum default. It then let me in.
I didn't have to recreate my account.

Awesome!!
I did the same thing...changed to forum default skin and now my original account works!! Thanks for the tip

 

[Kraj]

I don’t know if this will be of any help but it seems that data may not have been totally lost...

That's interesting. So it would appear the contents of individual posts still exist and are linked to the poster, but the references that string posts together in a thread and references a forum location are gone.

I wonder if Jon can temporarily remove the limit of 500 on the "Find All Posts by User" query, and then people can skim their own post list for ones they remember as being particularly useful and repost them?

 

[MrsGorilla]

being particularly useful

Ah, that's the key now, isn't it?

 

[emcf]

Where ?

mike375's posts maybe?!? maybe he's the hacker!!