Gb Bill
Is there any reason to keep all these back pages alive.
A substantial deletion would make the data base more manageable.
Yes there are many very good reasons to keep the old posts.
a) The "old posts" are a large part of what makes GBO an Information Resource. If we Deleted the old posts we would be deleting what many people are here for.
b) The hacker placed the same phrase on the every post and all I had to do was download the sql of the topics table in the database, write a rather simple enough search and replace program, run the program on the sql file, re-upload the sql and inject it into the database over-writing the bad data. Which only took 8 hours to do of which most of it was waiting on my program to finish the search and replace of the hackers message.
so in short no that was not nor would it ever be an option. We are also doing backups every 24 hours of the database now so in the future at most we will only loose 24 hours of posts.
I am sure at some point in the future we will be hacked again, we are a large site and our content is pro gun and pro hunting and pro war so we will get hacked again. We can not prevent it we can only make it very hard to do and limit the amount of damge done.
Also as a side note I recomend that you remove your email from your sig as this is a very good way to land on every mailing list on the net.
I started at the end and found all the pages had the war removed already
I had already started the update by the time you was posting your message.
Matt