Welcome back! (Also problem reporting)

[Emily]

Hi everyone. We're back again, thanks to the hard work of Vilandra and Dale.

Unfortunately, we were hacked again. This was not a hack that targeted just CS specifically, rather a hack that was just taking advantage of a software vulnerability, and our forums were one of many affected.

A few things. The hacker deleted all member accounts. This was, of course, a terrifying realization. But we have a superhero on our side. Vilandra was able to restore almost all of the accounts, with the exception of a few new member accounts. She has been working on restoring what didn't restore from backup manually, and will post in reply here what to do if you have an account that seems to still be affected.

Avatars are gone again, so anyone who uploaded a new av after our last problem will need to re-add it. For some reason, this is an issue that keeps happening when we are upgraded. We're still not sure why.

If you notice any other problems, please post in this thread or let us know.

Brina and I, and Nane and Starship want to thank you all for your patience. We've been through a lot together here in this place. We always manage to weather it. We're grateful to you all for hanging in there with us.

Emily and Brina

[Vilandra]

Hello everyone

There are about 10 accounts that didn't make it in the restoration. All of the affected accounts registered after May 22. If you are one of these (plus I think there might be one more):

--Penny
--Starrynight
--bblack4jc
--ZenDancer
--Trihard
--pearl taylor
--abhikumar
--Sky
--Hud3728

Please register again for a new account. If you will post here with your old name, I can try and link your new account to the old posts. It will be a big help if you can find one of your old posts and link me to it.

If you are one of these three:

--Berniefletch47
--girl-in-amber
--Eliza.D

I was able to create a new account for you and link it to your old posts. But you will need to reset your password, and fill out your profile and preferences again. My apologies.

Also, if you had any special forum access, you will all need to re-request it, because I believe those were lost.



One other thing to note: folks may notice that their posts counts are off. Once we get the accounts squared away I will rebuild the post counts so they will be correct. Please bear with us for a bit!

Also, if anyone notices any posts that don't have a username, if you could link the thread here, that will help me add back more user accounts.



Thank you for your patience!

[Catie]

Wow! A heartfelt thank you to all our staff and especially to Vilandra and Dale for your hard work this week to bring everything back online. You all are amazing!

[Overcome]

Thank you all for all of your hard work!

[cookie]

thank you much! i'm so glad cs is back!