SPB is back!

Posted by Matt on Monday 27th December, 2004

It's been a turbulent week for your favourite webzine.

Monday 20th December, a crazy internet worm (read: virus, for the simple-minded) took SPB off the air. It got in through a sneaky security hole in phpBB, our forum software. From there, it then replaced the content of every single page on the site (and not just SPB itself; also all the board posts, and all the staff's personal pages) with a message saying "This page has been defaced!!!".

The most recent backup of the site we had was from August. In itself this was not a huge issue, as the content for the site and board (the two most important things) is stored elsewhere in databases that aren't formatted like the rest of the site. Because of this, the worm (which was festively dubbed Santy, click here for more info on it, and the 90,000 other sites it took out) couldn't touch our content.

Late into monday night, Matt slaved away trying to restore the site. He got moderately far with this mission until WHAM! The site stopped responding. What had gone wrong? Well..

It seemed SPB's host (the internet company that keeps us online) had gone down. All the sites hosted by them were offline, prompting some angry messages on their forums. Downtime is normal for webhosts, but this time they took the cake. We were finally restored to our glory (although defaced) on christmas eve. But alas, the aforementioned databases which control the site's content were missing. WAS SPB LOST FOREVER?

In actual fact, the databases came back up on boxing day. Since then, the board has been replaced with a better software that hopefully won't leave the site with a gaping backdoor that allows evil computer scripts to attempt to take us out.

So that should help explain just why the site has been offline since monday, and why everything looks a little crazy. Some parts of the site (most notably the demo and show reviews sections) are still a little jerky, and if you experience any problems, please take a minute to mail Matt with news of whatever isn't working.