Well, that happened
As readers may have noticed, SM was the target of a particularly virulent spam attack which managed to screwz0r our database right in the middle of AAAs. Everything is up and running now — and we have a new, shiny, and hopefully impregnable version of Word Press running now. However we’ve lost about a fortnight worth of entries. I’m working on remporting some of them, but alas there may be some lost content that may have been sucked permanently into the ether. Anyway, we are back to our regularly scheduled programming for now.
Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org
So was this a random attack, or was it directed at killing political discussion around the AAA meetings?
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Some happier Savageminds news: Google “nature top 50 science blogs” and Savageminds actually shows up in the search page. Click on the link and you’ll see that ‘Nature’ arranged the links by Technorati rank and Savageminds came in at 17. Impressive. You guys must know about this since it’s from 2006, but I haven’t seen it mentioned, so I thought I’d let you know.
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Oops: Google nature top 50 science blogs without the quotes.
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You were missed! Glad you’re back in action.
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yes the spam attack was all due to an EVIL PLOT by AAA PRESIDENT ALAN GOODMAN to SILENCE US!
No just kidding.
I think what happened was that we moved from one server to another, but did not update WordPress to the latest version before we all took off for AAAs. As a result someone screwed around with an exploit — probably somehow so that they could use our machine to send comment spam — and we weren’t around to fix it. I don’t think it actually _worked_ (the sysadmins assure us they have no trouble) but it did end up b0rking the database.
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Rex: Thank you for dealing with this.
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