What happened to our group???

[Kaje]

On July 6th this group disappeared off Goodreads...

Well, Goodreads managed a more spectacular bug than ever, and lost several groups, from ours to the J.D. Robb Fangroup, to "Around the World in 52 Books" to Goodreads Malasia. It had nothing to do with LGBT, and we were not singled out, just unlucky.



Thay spent a week working on it and found and restored a cached version.

I know many of you had creative content, stories, pictures, discussions and more uploaded. I really hope they have recovered that material. I will be organizing and checking the group this morning.

Feel free to comment (politely) if you wish. I will post more information about what happened and why, as I have it. I will let you know what might be missing.

I will send out a group-wide notice later this morning by PM.

Thanks to everyone for sticking with us. More to follow, but hey, We're Back!!

-Kaje

[Kaje]

Looking at the dates, it appears we were restored as of July 1st. Anything posted after that date is probably gone.

Let me know if you have specific concerns related to this (although there may not be much I can do about it.) I will try to post some of the equal marriage and other LGBT rights info that I know was in that thread as soon as I have time.

[Kaje]

By the way, if all the threads register as "new" for you, with red numbers, and those don't go away even after you revisit the old threads you should know this is something all the lost groups are reporting - we're hoping to get a fix for it too...

[Kaje]

Further input from Goodreads to our questions:


Kaje wrote: "I can't make the "new" red indicators go away either - viewing the posts in the threads does not change them to "seen"

If I add a comment to an old thread - eg. one starting with 7 (7 new) - then it goes to 8 (7 new)

The new comment is recognized as one I've seen, but the old content is not.

We're working on the "can't mark as read" issue, and the missing pictures from your group, Jonetta. If anyone notices anything else missing, please let us know!

The most recent backup we could obtain was from July 2 at 2:30 a.m. PST; any information added to deleted groups after that point was, unfortunately, lost for good. I'm sorry about that.

Regarding specifically what this bug was, unfortunately I can't share much publicly; it was related to our spam prevention efforts and saying anything much more about the details opens up a whole bunch of security issues for us. In the spirit of preventing this from ever happening again, the less said, the better.



Jennifer wrote: "have measure been taken to prevent this in the future? (as best is possible in an evolving landscape.) is our information at risk? (or has it - our information - been compromised in any way?)"

Yes, we are definitely taking measures to prevent this from happening again. Thankfully, your information was not compromised. Your accounts and information are fully secure; the security risk I indicated has to do with our anti-spam mechanism. We keep the details under lock and key to make it harder for spammers to circumvent it!

We aren't going to make a site-wide announcement for the people who joined these groups after the backup was created, but we are trying to search the request logs to get a complete list of these users. After that, we should be able to add them back to the groups. This may take another day or two, but we're definitely working on this.

[Kaje]

Richele ♥'s Dex & Sloane wrote: "I'm curious as to why it happened.

Thanks for keeping us all posted, Kaje!"

I don't think we'll get more than "related to our spam prevention"

We can speculate whether it was GR being hacked, or some parameter they set up to prevent spam that perhaps triggered legitimate groups who were doing something spammish (maybe sending out batches of individual PMs in one day from one moderator? I've sent out twenty welcome letters in one day, when I got behind. Who knows?) They are not going to say, though.

[Kaje]

Latest word:

"It might still be a couple of days on the mark-as-read bug, unfortunately. Sorry about that! We haven't finished restoring all of the groups yet, and can't fix these bugs until we do.

We're looking into the new members you indicated; I'll update when I know more. (I'll probably need more information but at the moment I'm not sure exactly what information I'll need.) "

[Kaje]

It appears that the "mark as read" bug has been resolved now (YAY!) so I think we are back in business completely.