And We're Back! (Patreon)

Finally, after more than a week, we're back! TWB is currently showing the strips from back when everything crashed, but I'll be updating the updater later this evening, and we should be back to being 100% caught up by Friday morning.

I'll probably have a note for Friday's update, explaining what happened for those readers who aren't Patrons, regular readers of the Guild or MCB, or otherwise knew what was going on.

For those who offered or suggested alternate hosting, thank you, and I'm definitely keeping options in mind at the moment. A week-plus total outage is unacceptable, and I've been offered little more than "gee, that's too bad" as recompense.

But, on the other hand, I've been with this host for 20 years now, and while we have had the occasional outage over the years, up until now they've been both very rare and generally brief.

I'm given to understand that this outage started with the discovery of malware on one part of the system, which was taken offline to clear it, and  then further inspection revealed a wider spread of the infection, requiring taking nearly the entire system offline.

That led to either the cause of or the discovery of a hardware issue- I have no idea what- which then required physical replacement.

Between- I'm assuming, here- having to get new hardware shipped to Alaska (if not over from Asia) *and* the scanning of all backups for traces of the malware, it all took a great deal of time. Like many of you, I was greatly annoyed that they couldn't muster the hardware to so much as put up a customized "sorry, we're having server issues, we're working on it!" page, and instead left all of us- me included- in the dark, staring at a blank screen for a week, then a meaningless default page for another three or four days.

Had I known it was going to go on this long, I might have thought harder about migrating to another host, but that's a decision I wasn't going to take lightly.

Regardless, we're back, and hopefully with fresh servers and upgraded security and all that. We should be pretty stable from here on out, at least for a while.

I would ask a favor, however: I'm sure there's more than a few people out there, not part of the regular boards or here on Patreon, who likely bailed after more than a week of the site being missing, and may therefore not know we're back up. If you could help me out by spreading the word a bit, I'd sure appreciate it.  :)

Thank you, and thanks for your patience!

Doc.