The forums have been offline for a while, we know and you know. They're back now though, but missing some things. To find out what happened and how you can help us recover, read on.

On Tuesday, March 10th in the late evening (Eastern Time) we began receiving reports of topics with no posts in them. We quickly took the forums offline to hopefully prevent any further damage from taking place. Once we began to examine the situation, we discovered that both the entire posts table and the private messages table of BZPower's database, essentially every single post and message that have been made, had been deleted. The forums were kept offline, and our hosting company was contacted to restore the table from the most recent backup, which we believed to have been a week or two ago.

As it turns out, things often don't go as we expect them to, and the most recent usable backup was from September 2008. This is not anyone's fault, it's just a result from an unfortunate oversight that we intend to correct moving onwards. Having little choice, we asked our host to replace the posts and messages tables with the ones from the backup. Once this had been done, we realized this still left all of the topics that had been posted since September 2008 with no posts in them. We opted to have them removed, asking our hosts to replace the topics table with the one from the backup.

Due to a miscommunication, the entire site was rolled back by our host to the one in the backup. This meant all members, news stories, blog posts, etc, since September 2008 were gone. This was obviously not what we intended to happen, and we quickly tried to get things straightened out between ourselves and our host. This took longer than expected, and the site or forums were offline for the rest of Wednesday, through to today as a result.

During this time, some malicious files were found to have been uploaded to the server. We believe they may be related to what happened to the database and have since purged them from the site. In addition, we see no evidence to support the idea that if this was a malicious attack that it was related to the recent cases of inappropriate images being spread around BZPower via the PM system.

Now things are back to as normal as they're getting. As you may have surmised, this means that all topics, posts, and messages made on or after September 28, 2008 have been lost. We know this is a rather large blow to some of you, but we've dealt with worse and we'll get over this stumble as well. For the time being, topics posted in on or after September 1, 2008 will not be closed for revival. Expect this to continue for the rest of the month to encourage discussion to begin again.

To restate: the only thing we lost are posts, topics, and private messages. All new members are still here. All of your blog entries are still here. All the news is still here.

Now, here's what you can do to help:
Repost your topics! If you made a MOC, wrote a story, made some art, or started a game, feel free to repost it! If you made a topic discussing the storyline, the sets, or any Bionicle, Lego, or other topic, repost them! We need to build back up all the content we lost, and we need you guys, the members, to help us. Staff will be working on updating official topics and restarting contests as soon as they can, but they can't do everything. You're the ones that make BZPower so awesome, so we need your help to bounce back!

The Administration would like to apologize to everyone for this downtime as well as for the data loss. We will do our best to avoid it or similar circumstances from happening again. Thanks everyone for your patience, support, and understanding.

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