AffiliateManager.net - Hacked & Destroyed
Affiliate Manager Forum Hacked and Destroyed
Linda reports, as does Jeff Molander, on the unfortunate, and somewhat creepy destruction of AffiliateManger.net, Shawn Collins' industry forum for affiliate managers and vendors...
AffiliateManager.net, the best private "gated" industry forum and the ONLY real forum exclusively for affiliate managers was hacked and destroyed. I didn't get a chance to blog about this yesterday but did want to write about it today. Shawn Collins, an industry leader built this manager community and it has become a primary information source for affiliate managers and service providers. Visiting that forum was a vital part of our daily routine and the loss of 2 years of valuable insight and posts is just, well… hard to even imagine someone could do this.
I'm aware that some in the affiliate industry aren't to keen on Shawn, but i'm pretty sure noone would wish that kind of sad affair on anyone.
Information Terrorism
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Maybe he was just too embarassed to admit he deleted it himself by accident.
There is still a backup on place I know :)
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-07,GGLD:en&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eaffiliatetip%2Ecom
Affiliate Manager Forum is Back up
Hi all,
The forum is back up with new software although all the old posts have been lost. On his affiliatetip blog, Shawn says:
I was having withdrawal, since that was one of the forums in addition to of course, ThreadWatch, that I read 1st thing in the day, so glad it's back!
Linda Buquet AKA Catalyst
No database backup?
Hard to imagine...
He wrote
"The bad news is that neither my host nor I had a backup of the forum activity. That means nearly two years of valuable conversations among hundreds of affiliate managers are now gone for good. "
i guess its possible
but i've never come across a situation where the client or the host did not have a single backup for two years of activity. I could understand losing a few weeks or months of posts, but I am shocked that no posts were backed up. Granted the backup for the post activity would have been a big file but still those posts are critical to the business. You need to back that stuff up. I'd see if someone could write a scraper in time and go grab whatever you can from google before it disappears forever.
Archive.org
?
---edit:
never mind that: forum doesn't appear to be in it...
it's one of those things
where you want to say how stupid it is not to have one but you also start wondering when you last actually ran a trial restore for some of your sites ....
i'm lazy
i'll admit i don't backup any of my sites, BUT i am smart enough to realize i am lazy and only use hosts who will assume the backup responsibility for me :) Gurtie, you make a great point for people like me. If you never test a backup system how do you know it really works?
Static sods like myself don't really have that problem. Remind me NOT to start a forum.
I have tested it
I tested the restore when I had to change hosts.
I use vbulletin and have a cron to do a backup on the database twice a day. Only problem is the backups are saved on the server. And I forget to download them. So what if the whole thing is lost? Safest thing to do is have the cron save the backup to another server, but I've been too lazy to look into that. :-)
Gone again???
What's the deal, I wonder? New forum which was rocking with new posts is gone again. Back to the empty PHP shell that was left right after the hack.
Linda Buquet AKA Catalyst
Parasites?
no text was in this post......
Gone again??? NEVERMIND
The new forum is there. I was clicking the old link in my bookmarks which I swear I changed. Oh well...
Linda Buquet AKA Catalyst