General What's the scariest thing that ever happened to your site?

[Shortie]

Being that we are in the spooky month and slowly heading towards Halloween, I thought this would be a great question to ask!

What is the scariest thing that has happened to your site? Were you able to overcome it and get things back on track?

Share your worst website stories with us!

 

[Neo]

Not so much scary as hilariously funny.
My unofficial Xenforo support site had a person log in and make several veiled threats of legal actions because we dared to use Xenforo in the domain name as well as the site name of Xenforo Help Central and because apparently some of the posts on the site did not take a knee to the almighty Xenforo developers.
Was the user an actual Xenforo related person? I really don't know and really do not care.
Our domain is based in a locale that they have no copyright security of the name Xenforo. So that argument can pound sand. I have a strong suspicion that it is in reality one of those Xenforo cult members that sing praises all day while the actual script is laying turds. Suggestion for them... buy a LARGE tube of Anal EZE.
As to the other threats that were made of legal action. Please, feel free to do so. I would by more than happy, as would the person hosting the site, to have those funds covered for the next few millennia.

Aren't you special?

Aren't you special?

xenforohelp.com

 

[Nomad]

DDoS attack was the scariest thing that happened to my site. My sites are small and I never though these sites could be a target for DDoS attacks, yet it happened multiple times.

 

[Neo]

And now we have one identifying themself as Paul B. That's scary by itself.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I used to have a fairly large forum. I had over 100K posts and nearly 20K members. I even bought out my competition spending over $1,000.00 for their forum and DB.

This was back when I wasn't as mindful of security and backups as I am now.

A critical database error occurred and I lost everything.

I worked with my host to get it back but the error kept happening no matter what I did.

I effectively closed down the forum, started from scratch and never got back to where it was.

It was a very costly mistake and depressing.

I'm glad it happened. I learned a lot from it. I changed the way I do things.

 

[joelr]

I used to have a fairly large forum. I had over 100K posts and nearly 20K members. I even bought out my competition spending over $1,000.00 for their forum and DB.

This was back when I wasn't as mindful of security and backups as I am now.

A critical database error occurred and I lost everything.

I worked with my host to get it back but the error kept happening no matter what I did.

I effectively closed down the forum, started from scratch and never got back to where it was.

It was a very costly mistake and depressing.

I'm glad it happened. I learned a lot from it. I changed the way I do things.

Something similar happened to me.

You need backups of your backups. Really! For my main community, I now have an 'offsite' backup located with a totally different host in a totally different continent in a totally different country. It really comes down to the level of service continuity you want to provide - and how much you want to spend.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Something similar happened to me.

You need backups of your backups. Really! For my main community, I now have an 'offsite' backup located with a totally different host in a totally different continent in a totally different country. It really comes down to the level of service continuity you want to provide - and how much you want to spend.

Oh yeah, much different nowadays.

I'm an investigator for my day job. I retain all the video evidence that we collect. I always backup of two drives with the data.

I do that for my forums and my YouTube videos as well.

I really want something like this: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...int_rs6618v_thunderbolt_3_8_bay_sas_sata.html

But for me not for work haha

 

[Ravenfreak]

Back when Mighty No. 9 was still being worked on, there was some controversy that came out and many people came to my fan forum to harass my members and I. I made the mistake of forgetting to change the default phpBB settings from immediate registration to email approval. After that I turned on Admin approval because there were many people registering. Thankfully I didn't get DDoS'd but it was annoying.

 

[ladyquack]

Years ago our web host completely shut down without telling anyone. I was on vacation at the time and didn't have access to any backups. Out of six admins, the only one that was able to access any part of our site was located in South Korea, so trying to make the stars and time zones align to walk her through how to take a database backup and send it to me was interesting. It took about a week, but we were able to get everything back up and running on a new host.