Bleh. News, mostly bad.

Some foul cretin (I'm reasonably sure I know who it was) who was recently banned for spamming the shit out of the forum was evidently a script kiddie, and decided to take some revenge on us after I politely told him to bugger off. Ok, ok, so maybe I wasn't so polite. Anyway, he's run some kind of attack that corrupted a bunch of our database tables. I thought it was some complication with the new server hardware / setup, until I had a look at the webserver logs.

I didn't notice this until long after it had corrupted my local backups, so I had to pull in the offsite files, and those don't get updated so often - on purpose, of course, as it protects me against exactly this sort of problem.

So, bottom line... anything that's happened since Sept 1st has vanished forever into the interwebs. Any private messages, public posts, new members, et all. Also, all the changes I made to the setup to run on the new hardware, so if you spot something that I'd fixed in the last couple weeks that's broken again, let me know and I'll deal with it.

tldr; Ass attacks forums, we lose some posts. Ass IP banned at the firewall level, now sits crying at home in parent's basement.

Oh dear, I suspected that complete and utter w@nker had damaged the platform with his spam and associated acrtivities!

Well done Grimmjack (Dave?) on fixing it!

Picture folders and links to them are still working ok but I can't upload new pictures:
You need to work your "chmod" magic again!

"This album's directory couldn't be properly created, please make sure mgal_data/ and mgal_data/albums/ are chmodded to 0777 or 0755."

Col.

An address?  We could go all Jay and Silent Bob on him....

spammers and trolls are almost worth a bit of collateral damage.  Had a troll that was causing a lot of trouble on a cobra site.  I managed to find his address phone occupation and picture. Turned that over to some pissed off members in OZ and never heard from him again.  He was a fellow who really liked to stir things up across many sites which made him relatively easy to find. 

Good work(again) Dave!