I have been unable to access the site for several days.  (I kept getting a message that the server was not responding.)  I was finally able to log in today but a lot of my information is incorrect, almost like the pages were reset to like a couple months ago.  Books are not marked read, reviews are missing, books I removed from my reading list are back on the list, etc. 

Is this a known issue that is being addressed or do I need to try to fix everything?

Our host suffered a malware attack and had to shut down all their servers and move all clients to new machines etc. They used a backup of those sites and data to avoid moving the malware to the new machines.

Not sure what the next steps are but we're looking into it. For now I'd say stand by before you starts re-entering your data. We may be able to update the DB from our own backup. Chris is researching. Unfortunately there's not a ton we can do while we're at work so the solution may have to wait until we get home this evening.

More news as we have something to share. Thanks for your patience as we try to get back on our feet.

A2 is apparently restoring service in phases so we're crossing our fingers that they'll come back round to us and we'll get more of our data back.

As of now I suggest we stand by for a few days to see what happens before we attempt to restore anything that could get overwritten with a more recent backup.

At this time I’m not sure what’s going to happen but here is what we hope to be the case with the very limited info we have. 

The site has gone up and down several times since it first crashed so clearly they’re still struggling to fix things. We’ve seen data from 2 different backups at least so we know they have some options as to how far back they can go. This current version is from the third week of February. 

We know from what they’ve told us that they’re trying to bring their machines and clients back up in stages. We are hoping that they’ve picked a known good date before anyone’s data was compromised as the first reset and that they will come around in the next stage to update their clients to the most recent backup that is safe on a case by case basis.

We have had no indication that our site/data was actually a victim of the attack. It seems more likely that we got taken down, along with most everyone else, to stop the spread of the malware. If that is the case we shouldn’t lose a lot of data though I suspect we’ll lose at least a week’s worth at least since their backups are weekly. 

There’s a lot of speculation in that but that’s the best we have at the moment. A2’s not doing great in the communications department so all we can do is stand by while they sort things out.

I’m trying my best to be optimistic right now because I don’t like to suffer the worst case scenario until it becomes a fact. That is getting harder and harder as this goes on. I keep finding new ways in which we’re going to be royally screwed. It’s very frustrating and please believe me when I tell you that we feel your pain.

For right now we’re going to try and be patient as things work themselves out. We are trying to get more info and will pass along anything we can as soon as we can. Keep the faith friends. We’ll get through it one way or another.

Still holding at the moment. We put up a temporary info page late last night here:  http://www.worldswithoutend.com/notice.asp  and added a link in the sidebar.

We have a backup from March 31st that will be going up soon and we'll let everyone know here in this thread when that is complete. Fingers crossed.

Thanks for the kind words. It’s a horrible mess for sure and the site keeps going down which adds more uncertainty to the process. We’ve got to get away from this dumpster fire so we can rebuild. 

Real life bulldrek keeps getting in the way but we're getting closer. We're ready to transfer the site to our new host service then we'll load the data from the last backup we have. Can't offer a date or anything specific but it should be soon-ish. Crossed fingers and patience are still required.

We have been fixing a bunch of stuff around the site in the mean time so not all wasted time though it feels like it a bit.

Hello again everyone. The site has been down again from a database issue with our craptastic host service. This time almost exactly a week. Sheesh.

The good news is that we have our new host and site setup in hand and we've just been waiting on the A2 AHoles to fix our data so we can transfer it to the new host. We'll kick that off as soon as Chris gets home from work so he can monitor and test. Once that is done we'll flip the switch to the new host. Which will take the site down yet again but only for a few hours.

It is our hope that this will be the last of the outages and we can begin the long road to recovery for all that lost data. Going to be a busy week for me getting that sorted. More news as we have it. Thanks as always for your patience and all the good wishes we got from friends of WWEnd via email and text etc. Ya'll rock!

Finally have some good solid news. The site is set up on the new host in a Virtual Private Network that should speed things up a bit. Friday night we will shut down the forum and the site will go down for a few hours while we make the final transfer of the data over to the new host.

By Saturday morning we should be up and running again on the new host and we can put this sorry period behind us and begin the real work of repairing the lost data. Wish us luck!

That means we can start inputting new data again without fear of loss. If you've been holding back on tagging books or submitting reviews etc. you can get back to business as usual. That includes new book requests etc.

There is a bit of cleanup to do on the site. It looks like some of the updates I did some weeks ago are not showing on the new site so I'll have to check the CSS and work out what's missing. Unfortunately we had a big storm roll through Dallas on Sunday and I am without power at home. It's like the universe wants to thwart me at every turn. When I get power back on I'll start those fixes.

Please let us know here in this thread if you run into any problems. I guess we might as well start an errors list here too.

Yeah, that's all we've got, unfortunately. It's going to take a long time for sure but at least we still have all the book covers and author pics etc. That will help a bit. We should probably open up a discussion in the Uber thread about coordinating efforts etc. I know some other Ubers have started missing content lists already. I'd hate to duplicate any records in our haste to get back to normal.

It really is a ton of work and I understand your reluctance to take it on again. I'll help you with that as much as I can and I'm sure we can find some other Ubers who'd be willing to pitch in too. No reason you'd have to do it all by yourself the second time around. Maybe parcel it out into lists of 100 missing shorts to any volunteers? I'll certainly take up the challenge.

I have a lot of enthusiasm for the shorts you've been putting in and I think others will get more enthused when the new site goes up. The treatment for short fiction is much nicer in 3.0 and we have all those short categories to add to the awards to look forward to. I'm looking forward to more short fiction reading challenges and the like as we get deeper in those categories.

The other thing to keep in mind is that we have discouraged folks from requesting short fiction so your project was the only real source of shorts going in. I always looked at your project as setting up a nice foundation of the top short fiction that we would build on more actively once 3.0 launches.

I've got a list of many of the missing books, but not most of the short fiction. Give me a bit and I'll get that posted.