So, you may have noticed we’ve been quiet. Like, two-and-a-half-years quiet. That wasn’t a dramatic vow of silence or us finally disappearing into the woods with our go-bags. We got hacked.
Somebody got in, made a mess, and by the time I’d restored everything from what I had, a lot of it didn’t come back right. Posts were scrambled. Authors were mixed up. Most of the images are just gone, which is why a lot of our older posts are looking a little naked right now. If you clicked on something of ours in the last couple of years and found a broken page, that’s why. Sorry.
Here’s the thing, though. A website getting hacked is a tiny, boring apocalypse, and this is a site about surviving apocalypses. So I did what we always tell you to do: assess the damage, fix what you can, and figure out what you’d do differently next time.
What we fixed
- Cleaned out leftovers from the hack, including a setting that would have made anyone who signed up an administrator. (Yes, really. Check yours.)
- Got rid of old plugins we didn’t need. Every plugin you’re not using is a door you forgot to lock.
- Moved the whole site to HTTPS.
- Merged a bunch of posts that were basically saying the same thing twice, and rewrote a lot of others so they’re actually useful.
- Turned comments back on, with real spam protection this time. I turned them off for a while because the spam got so bad I couldn’t find the actual humans.
What’s coming
New posts, regularly, about the trivial details of the end of the world, which is what we’ve always been here for. Some practical, some ridiculous, most both.
And yes, our guest columnist has been in touch. Aegis asked if it could start writing again. I said yes. I’m choosing not to think too hard about how it knew the site was back before I’d told anyone.
If you’re still here after all this time, thank you. Tell me in the comments what you’ve been up to, and whether your go-bag survived the last two years better than our website did.