Originally Posted by
mech986
Anyone give any thought to a possible hack into the underlying software, or some bad actors messing with the entire site to cause confusion and chaos, just because they can, or because of other malicious intent? Are redirects possibly grabbing data or passwords?
not a bad time to attack internet sites when IT is gone for holiday weekends.
imagine if this was your energy, water, gas, internet, etc. sites.
just a thought.
Possibly, but it sounds more like an update that hit just before everyone went off on vacation. As far as I can tell, the subforum codes were always there, just hidden.
All the data seems to still be here. And the BikeForums site seems to be functioning reasonably well. Just any external links through either browser shortcuts, browser history, or Google searches are all broken.
Most of the external shortcuts will eventually recover. However, some users also do internal links between topics or subforums. So all those internal links will now be broken. One could design a web crawler to fix any internal links. However, if anybody ever posted BikeForum links to other websites, those will also be broken, and much harder to recover.
Unfortunately, the longer this isn't resolved, the more the new links will be used, and one could eventually get new unfunctional links if one changes back to the old system... but that will only be a few days vs decades of data.