IMPORTANT: Downtime: here's what we know

What is the status of the webmail, or the mail server in general? That is something I actively use and would like to know if it was breached at all.

The mail server is fine, because I've been able to get emails through it, even with the downtime.

Dang hackers and their breaches :/


But anyway thanks for alerting me, I knew something was off today when I got on and yes I will change my password to something more complex but easy for me to remember :3

Hiroshi Sotomura said:

Various features on PC are presently not working and we're working on getting that fixed.

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Does that include supporter features too? I was trying to change my user title like I have since their changes, and it came out with just the tags. I assume supporter features are also on the list of issues, correct?

Question i have images i added august 11th to one of my albums and theyre still there so is it only certain albums or members?
Also thanks to all the staff thats working so hard to make the forums back to 100% we really appreciate it!

Must not have been everything, my avatar was still there but my profile picture was gone. Both were uploaded on the same day. :p

Speaking of which, I think Visitor Message system is kinda broken for me. Not the VM chat system in its entirety, but for some reason, I can't get a notice when I got a new VM and stuffs.

Ya i asked on that and you have to go into the control panel if you want to view what new vms you get since the notification system for messages seems to be down but thankfully we still get quote notifications

It's unfortunate that such a nasty security breach occurred on PokeCommunity, but many thanks to the staff for alerting users about the situation. These compromises can take quite a toll on one.. Sigh...my "Super-ancient Pokémon"-based avatar and signature took me quite a while to format (particularly regarding borders and size), and this was the one time I opted for the PokeCommunity Forums' server to host my signature image.. >.<

Well, like Gelardan Lawrence III, I shall begin again and redo the image formatting.. I hope that things can be restored to normal pretty soon..

EDIT 1: Misread; it appears just my avatar is gone.. Thankfully, my signature image appears to be intact (*breathes sigh of relief*), although I'll still have to take some security measures..

EDIT 2: ...aand the cache apparently purged my signature image (which I luckily saved again beforehand). BACKUPS ARE ESSENTIAL, PEOPLE!

Is this the first time the forums were hacked? At least you had backups, although it sucks that nearly 6 months worth of avatars, profile pictures, albums and attachments are gone.

EDIT: Yeah, my avatar was gone when the forums were hacked, hence I had to reupload it. Could have been much much worse if there weren't any backups.

Dedenne1 said:

Question i have images i added august 11th to one of my albums and theyre still there so is it only certain albums or members?
Also thanks to all the staff thats working so hard to make the forums back to 100% we really appreciate it!

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Interesting. Not sure how to explain this one since I can see it too so it's unlikely to be a cached copy on your end, but it's good to know that at least some things have survived.

Natester said:

Is this the first time the forums were hacked? At least you had backups, although it sucks that 5 months worth of avatars, profile pictures, albums and attachments are gone.

EDIT: Yeah, my avatar was gone when the forums were hacked, hence I had to reupload it. Could have been much much worse if there weren't any backups.

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In recent times at least, yes, to the best of my knowledge. A few years ago we had a fairly serious hacking threat (along with innumerable other major forums, Pokémon ones included) but as far as I'm aware we weren't hit.

And you're right, it's very unfortunate; of course, definitely good that we have backups but they're quite old - from now on we're going to be backing up much more regularly. As said earlier we never expected an attack on the files themselves so we were under-cautious, but we're going to rectify that.

Speaking of albums, I do not think they were affected at all from this breach. But yes, the only things that are gone for good are the attachments (nearly 6 months worth). Good luck on fixing up the board, I didn't really think it was that bad.

EDIT: I should mention that avatars and profile pictures from before March 2015 are broken. Is this being fixed or will it be like this until the users (excluded banned users) update their avatars?

Dedenne1 said:

Question i have images i added august 11th to one of my albums and theyre still there so is it only certain albums or members?
Also thanks to all the staff thats working so hard to make the forums back to 100% we really appreciate it!

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I was informed yesterday (when inquiring about emblems on my profile post-March that were still appearing, but this is along the same lines) that this has to do with Cloudflare caching the images. If I were you, I would save any images you see that were uploaded after March and re-upload them because the cache could literally flush at any moment now.

Zach said:

I was informed yesterday (when inquiring about emblems on my profile post-March that were still appearing, but this is along the same lines) that this has to do with Cloudflare caching the images. If I were you, I would save any images you see that were uploaded after March and re-upload them because the cache could literally flush at any moment now.

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That explains why the pictures on the albums are still up. Does the cache flush itself automatically?

Bear with us.. all these cool little things that were recently added to PC are pretty much gone or severely broken and will need to be rebuilt (read that as re-coded) and tested. Give it some time.. it'll all be fixed soon™

I heard that album files were among the stuff that got wiped in the hacking attack but it appears it's not affected everyone's picture albums as mine are still intact. It was kinda surprising they'd target the files and not the actual forum database but at least it gave us a wake-up call to tighten our security.

Well done Steve, Jake and Audy on the swift reaction and hopefully everything will be fully repaired soon. With tougher security we'll hopefully never experience another incident like this again.,

I don't appear to get any notifications at all, just though I would let you guys know...
That appears to be fixed for me

Aww jeez. I've been through this on other forums before. Seems like people just love hacking them.

Ausaudriel said:

Attachments were the first thing we did, so those should be up now. Avatars etc. were surprisingly massive and were taking too much time so we didn't finish them. tbd.

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By tbd, do you mean by "to be determined" or "to be decided"? It would suck if it's left like this. I do understand that this would take weeks (at least) before everything is back to normal.

EDIT: By "back to normal" I mean everything that was deleted from the file server this past Saturday (minus stuff uploaded after March 2015) is reuploaded onto the file servers.

fenyx4 said:

It's unfortunate that such a nasty security breach occurred on PokeCommunity, but many thanks to the staff for alerting users about the situation. These compromises can take quite a toll on one.. Sigh...my "Super-ancient Pokémon"-based avatar and signature took me quite a while to format (particularly regarding borders and size), and this was the one time I opted to the PokeCommunity server to host my signature.. >.<

Well, like Gelardan Lawrence III, I shall begin again and redo the image formatting.. I hope that things can be restored to normal pretty soon..

EDIT: Misread; it appears just my avatar is gone.. Thankfully, my signature image appears to be intact (*breathes sigh of relief*), although I'll still have to take some security measures..

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I hate to say this, but your signature image is gone.

Hikamaru said:

I heard that album files were among the stuff that got wiped in the hacking attack but it appears it's not affected everyone's picture albums as mine are still intact.

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Hiroshi Sotomura mentioned that avatars, profile pictures and attachments were purged from the breach on Saturday. Album pictures were not affected, surprisingly.

Does the attachments we successfully uploaded after the downtime affected too?