Greetings!

The site has returned from the dead! A special thanks to Jac for coming out of retirement and working with the server's support to get the backup up and running so that I could finish things off! And a big thanks to Karel for all he did during this SQL Injector attack - hunting down causes and brainstorming solutions.

Most of all, though, thanks to all of you for the understanding you've shown during this downtime. I know that an outage as long as this is very trying for membership and it is great to see the dedication to the DJB as evidenced by the continuing posts in the forums, the wiki updates, and the presence of everyone on IRC. w00t.

So...we're up. There has been some minor data loss from the point of the backup to the time the site was taken down. Looking briefly, it appears that we lost a day. Not horrible. So...if there were award recommendations, promo recommendations, reports, etc during that time; you'll have to post them again.

Sorry for that.

And now for some question/answer time:

Q: Can we expect another attack?

A: When we were first attacked, Jac wrote a series of 'data scrubbers' meant to intercept attacks. They worked well for a long while until a devious bot found a way around it...resulting in our most recent predicament. I've done some work tightening up those scrubbers and implementing them in places they hadn't been implemented yet...hopefully that will protect us going forward. But we won't be fully safe until there is some serious re-architecture in the DJB code.

Q: Where do we go from here, dearest Orv?

A: Well, we trudge onwards. I can assure you that the SCL Office is already hard at work moving us to a more stable environment.

Q: What would you do if I told you I was the bot?

A: I would come to your house and chop off your hands and poke out your eyes...then poop on your cat.