VGChartz got attacked [IMPORTANT]

[Ryuu96]

EpicRandy said:

trunkswd said:

As you can all see Machina has provided an update in the OP. All "deleted" posts haven't actually been deleted, but some data is missing from them such as what thread they belonged in and the user who posted them. The first step is to restore all posts from the last reliable back-up from two years ago, which will bring back about 580,000 of the 750,000 missing posts. The second step in restoring all the other posts from those affected is something we are still working to figure out. 

As Machina noted, the ability to "delete" posts has been completely removed from Admin tools, so this shouldn't happen again in the future. And JLauro has fixed the issue that caused back-ups to be corrupted. 

I somehow wish I could help, I've done this kind of work in the past and I somehow enjoy this (reconstructing data using alternative sources). But chance are techno used for data storage here fall outside of my expertise which are MS SQL, MySQL and to some degree MongoDB. 

I've been thinking the quote feature might be used to identify some of the post as they identify the thread and original poster like this one (Which identify one of Ryuu deleted post in the Ukraine thread) but since quotes are fully rendered and not just referenced by ID and they also can be partial it would require use of various complex query which would also be very resources intensive to run. Still it might manage to identify a few 1000's of the remaining ~170k post.

Also in the end if unidentified post are left, it might be a good idea to associate them all to a generic fake account in a specifically created close thread that may offer the possibility for known affected user to claim post (probably using the report feature). 

I'd take all the help I can get if I was running VGChartz, Lol. What you suggested is one of our ideas though.

Plan is to rollback by 2ish years for only the users affected (40+ whom contributed about 750k+ posts) and I found out that VGC added about 170kish posts across the last 2 years but since we'd only be rolling back for certain users, it would be less than 170k left to recover. From there we don't know how to mass restore the rest yet, so the current last resort plan is to dump them into a single thread for users to claim as their own.

Just going to copy/paste what Talon said, Lol.

The goal is that Step 1 will be: Have the entire table of posts restored (from whatever the last "good" backup is dated) to a table with a completely different name. We'll then run down that table and pull over every post for the 40+ users that were affected and insert into the current table of posts.

Nothing "new" should be affected and the end result should be a gap of about 2yrs of missing posts.

It's still a lot but not 750k at least, Lol. It makes the thread method a lot more viable.

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 19 October 2022