AffiliateManager.net - Hacked & Destroyed

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AffiliateManager.net - Hacked & Destroyed

twadmin on Sun, 2005-04-24 10:20.

Rumours & Scandal

13 comments

Source Title:
Affiliate Manager Forum Hacked and Destroyed

Source Url:
http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2005/04/21/affiliate-manager-forum-hacked/

Story Text:

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

Comments

SlyOldDog on Sun, 2005-04-24 12:43.

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

Linda Buquet on Sun, 2005-04-24 18:39.

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've abandoned the old software for something more fortified and rich in features. And the AffiliateManager.net Forum lives again.

While the past messages were all vaporized, the accounts were still in tact. So anybody that was active in the old forum can login to their account at http://www.affiliatemanager.net/forums/

And I encourage affiliate managers that wish to participate for the first time to join us.

Let's talk about the future of affiliate marketing, not the past.

I invite everybody to ask any questions they have about affiliate marketing, so we can start to build a whole new archive of useful information."

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?

Jill on Sun, 2005-04-24 19:59.

Hard to imagine...

He wrote

MrMackin on Mon, 2005-04-25 06:53.

"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. "

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

Wit on Mon, 2005-04-25 07:18.

---edit:

never mind that: forum doesn't appear to be in it...

it's one of those things

Gurtie on Mon, 2005-04-25 07:21.

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

goodroi on Mon, 2005-04-25 07:29.

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?

Wit on Mon, 2005-04-25 07:32.

Static sods like myself don't really have that problem. Remind me NOT to start a forum.

I have tested it

Tom on Mon, 2005-04-25 20:12.

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. :-)