Seriously, months to get the site back up and running and little to no information on what actually happened or what took so long. We've all seen bits and pieces of info on Twitter, Reddit, Discord and elsewhere, but most of it is rumor, speculation or just people trying to fan the flames. So, what happened and why almost four months to do what should have been a simple DB restore to another host?
I remember, on the last day of ASSEMblergames being online, there were some strange ads popping up on the site, some even partly on the background of the site (behind the posts). I think I was also redirected to some malware sites at random. I guess it took time to figure out what exactly happened and what was changed by the hackers, and revert everything back to normal... No idea what the current backup strategy is, but having daily database backups should be useful if this ever happens again.
A quick look at this thread may aid you. https://assemblergames.com/threads/reply-function-broken.65755/ As Denryu mentions, ads were popping up somehow. These were injected ads. I was having issue replying/posting correctly and hadnt realized ads had made their way to the site due to my adblockers. This in turn showed something was functionally wrong. Now as for the reason why it happened, no idea, only those who know can share. Regardless, it showed that something had been compromised and that it was on an extreme level.
As everyone has already mentioned, the site was under attack from injected ads. The reason it took so long to get the site back up and running was because ASSEMbler was very ill at the time which slowed down progress.
I was very ill. There's not much more to it than that. Site needs more people it can rely upon. Already started on that.
I'm glad the site is back, it's the only forum I still hang around to these days. If there's a next time it would be good to just try and be more open about it and let people know what's going on, and if there's no clear ETA also just say so. I think being transparent is key. The Reddit site turned into a flame war, everyone was extremely pissed off, sad to see really. ASSEMbler, it's good that you are thinking on expanding the team, I think that is long due and will help you unload some of the weight of running it, hopefully making things run smoother.
