Notes

The Gaming Gang Returns from the (Near) Grave

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handfromthegraveI can happily say all the troubles the website was experiencing over the past two months or so are now a thing of the past. I’m guessing a lot of people may have thought the lack of articles and videos over that period of time was due to my dealing with cancer but the reality is my health issues had mainly very little to do with the slowdown -and eventual screeching halt – of content.

What happened was TGG was hacked a few months ago and a script had been uploaded to the hosting server of which I wasn’t aware was present. Visitors to the site probably noticed a major problem with images showing as broken links in the posts and, with the previous site design, the image slideshows tending to be broken as well and refused to load.

Unfortunately my hosting company wasn’t the most helpful as they don’t seem to be the most knowledgeable when it comes to hosting WordPress sites – something I find to be pretty amazing since nearly 20% of the web runs on that content management system! No one seemed to have a clue as to what was causing the issues so, as with most things in life, I decided if it was going to get fixed I was going to have to do it myself.

Add to this the fact I’d loaned my video camera to a friend to take with her on vacation and then had to wait more than five weeks to finally get it back led to no new videos being uploaded either. Even better, she had erased the memory card which had video I had shot but hadn’t uploaded to edit – Yes! I know that’s my fault right there as I should have known better. Well heap on top of that my ongoing treatment, while in the midst of a job search, and it got to the point I almost didn’t even want to try to put together articles and reviews. Honestly, how excited would you be to post something which was only going to end up looking all broken and screwed up by the end of the day? How many times can you continue to reupload and recrop images only to watch them disappear a couple days later before you’d start to lose your mind?

For most of the past month I invested all my free time into learning more about the back end of the server so I wouldn’t have to rely on the support team at the hosting company. Alongside this I began redesigning the site in order to celebrate TGG’s third anniversary; I wanted a bigger and bolder look as well as a better system for people to check out our reviews.

At no time was I prepared to throw in the towel but I’m not joking when I say I invested hundreds of hours into A) finding out just what was breaking the site and, B) putting together the new design. To make everything  even more of a challenge it looks like the hacker came back, while I was in San Diego at Comic-Con, and uploaded a new version of the malicious script which led to even bigger problems.

Earlier this week I finally tracked down the script – it was a hacked legitimate WordPress file which still performed the needed function but also played with other aspects the original was never intended to rewrite. Once I was able to find the culprit most of the fixes were pretty easy. All that was needed now was to sift through over 3000 articles to manually replace images. While I was doing that I also went through our over 300 reviews to make edits so they now share a standard layout to be implemented into an easier upcoming sorting feature.

Folks who are used to visiting The Gaming Gang have probably already noticed not only the visual changes but also the increased speed of the site as well! I know plenty of gaming sites have gone the way of the dodo due to server issues – Board Gaming News comes immediately to mind – and I wasn’t going to let that happen to TGG! I’m a stubborn SOB, what can I say? Even a server crash and the loss of a bunch of data wasn’t going to stop me.

So if anyone out there thought TGG was on its last legs (and for the casual visitor I can understand that assumption) let me say that was never the case. Now that the security of the site has been hardened and, from what I can tell, nearly all of the 5000+ images are restored, my focus can once again to cranking content out.

Thanks so much for sticking with the site through this bump in the road and here’s to returning things to normal. Or at least as normal as things ever are around these parts!

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