PSA--Recent Chucklefish Forum Breach

Hello, everyone. I’m currently in the middle of finals and end-of-year papers, but I wanted to mention a recent event in the gaming community and what it should mean to us.

I’m referring to a recent hack on the Chucklefish Forums, the developers of Starbound (among many other games). Apparently, there was a large-scale attack that wiped out a huge portion of their forums. A particularly unfortunate problem is that their last backup seems to have been in March or so–this means half a year of discussions and posts are likely gone forever.

As Chucklefish is recuperating from this loss, I’d like to bring this up for the benefit of our own users here on the Discourse. If you are posting large, intricate threads or are coming up with interesting suggestions, mod concepts, bug reports, etc… please consider keeping a personal copy of them. It’s a harsh reminder of how impermanent the internet is, but at the very least I feel that we can benefit from this and prepare if something of this nature ever were to occur with Team Radiant.

That’s pretty much all I wanted to bring up–my condolences go out to anyone who was personally affected by the attack, and I hope your community comes back strong.

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As sad as it is, and a good reminder about data security and redundancy, I do wonder how the data was deleted “permanently” when according to the developers they hackers had no access to the Database. As I have not used Xenforo before, I am not sure how it handles deletions, but here on Discourse it is not possible to “truly” delete a post without database access (AFAIK).

While we are on the topic, I would love to hear from @system, @zogstrip, or another member of the Discourse team about how Discourse is set up to avoid a situation like this. Can an Admin delete a post permanently without access to the Database? How often is a hosted Discourse site backed up?

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