Disaster Stories

[Jessi]

I know most of you have screwed up a site a time or two while tweaking and fiddling with things you shouldn't be. Sometimes it's an easy fix....sometimes, not so much.

 

So what's your worst disaster story and how long did it take you to fix?

 

Mine isn't exactly a design or tweaking failure. Way back when, years ago, I was just starting a blog for the first time and well, long story short, I didn't know that hotlinking was frowned upon. It took a few months before someone finally messaged me about it and I apologized, reuploaded the picture elsewhere, etc, and thought all was fine. But it wasn't. In another post, the original owner had replaced the image with a p*rn image that I have -no- idea how long it was live on my site. Needless to say, it took hours to go back through and reupload pictures on my own hosting or simply remove pictures. I had always linked back to the original source and never claimed the pictures as my own, but because I was hotlinking, it was a big no-no. Oops!

[ChuckTesta]

LOL, replacing it with Pron images is super funny!

 

My worst messup was uploading a virus to my own site. DOH!!!

 

So i was brand new to the forum scene and was looking at any and all mods to add. Heck, i was going Mod crazy! I stumbled upon a mod that a user had put on a site and it looked great. I downloaded it from an untrusted source and uploaded it and installed in the site. Next thing i know, my members are PM'ing me telling me some blackhole thing was causing their browser to reject the site... so i started freaking out and tried to uninstall the stuff... couldn't. I was trying to do this as fast as i could and looking for help in all the wrong places. I ended up sending a mass email out (500 members) and told them i'm sorry about everything, but i have to completely wipe the site so i don't infect anyones computers. I lost about 15,000 posts and maybe 20 members came back.

 

It was probably the worst day of my internet existence. But, i'm back on the saddle and ready to rock!

[Nathan]

Probably worst ever was when I was still on Windows 32 bit, as the virus doesn't effect 64bit machines.

I went to a site that I was a regular on and they had been infected with Malware, but I had no idea. So it was then on my computer.

What the virus did was look for an FTP client on your computer, most store passwords as clear text somewhere on your computer, connects, any index.php or .html file it finds it adds code to it. Then your site was infected.

 

I don't think it really did anything else, was just super annoying to fix all my sites.

[DevilKid]

I am not sure what the worst thing I have done is but one bad thing that I have done is that I used a free forum hosting website which wasn't well established and I went off paying $50ish to get ads removed and all to find out in the next 2 days, I had been IP banned.

[Amdac]

I haven't had any bad horror stories yet. My biggest flaw is that I like to make modifications to templates on the fly rather than doing it with an inactive style that nobody can see. Often this results in my site being brutally messed up for short periods at a time whenever I make a mistake, but I can generally fix it pretty quick.

 

If my sites were larger, I'd definitely rethink my approach.

[ChuckTesta]

I haven't had any bad horror stories yet. My biggest flaw is that I like to make modifications to templates on the fly rather than doing it with an inactive style that nobody can see. Often this results in my site being brutally messed up for short periods at a time whenever I make a mistake, but I can generally fix it pretty quick.

 

If my sites were larger, I'd definitely rethink my approach.

 

I'm pretty sure i do the exact same thing... ALL the time.

[EllaHalligan]

Probably worst ever was when I was still on Windows 32 bit, as the virus doesn't effect 64bit machines.

I went to a site that I was a regular on and they had been infected with Malware, but I had no idea. So it was then on my computer.

What the virus did was look for an FTP client on your computer, most store passwords as clear text somewhere on your computer, connects, any index.php or .html file it finds it adds code to it. Then your site was infected.

 

I don't think it really did anything else, was just super annoying to fix all my sites.

 

Oh, that is horrible. My ex-husband worked in IT, so I was already really used to virus protection and being super-cautious online long before I got into IM. One of the few good things I got out of the relationship (the other being my teens, of course!)

 

I guess my best "virus" story is actually from the company that my ex was the IT manager for a few years back. Do you remember the "I love you" virus? My ex tried to make sure everyone knew about it... but the actual boss of the company was a total moron (no really... his dad bought him the company to give him something to keep him busy and away from the rest of the truly productive companies he ran! He once yelled at my ex because he couldn't get a program to run.... on a computer he hadn't bothered to turn ON!) ... anyway, of course, he opened the virus because he believed everyone loved him.

 

The funny part, though, is that four women who worked for that company got the virus in their email (because the boss opened his) and complained to my ex when he got mad at them for opening it after being warned... and they said that because it was from the boss they assumed it was legit! (Sure, ladies, you were hoping the brain-dead millionaire actually loved you..... right...)

[SpikeTheLobster]

Hmmm... I have three disaster stories of different kinds but I'll stick to the most painful one.

 

The first was a writing disaster. I reviewed games for a couple of online magazines back in the 90s (Gone Gold and Wargamer, specifically). The latter is obviously more of a grognard site, since it's based around military stuff, but I did mostly RTS and non-hardcore reviews since I don't have the background for those. There was this really important release - a 3D wargame, which is something that is extremely rare - that no one picked up to review, so the boss asked if I'd do it. I did, stating clearly that I'm not a grognard and so the focus would be on the game from a non-wargamer's point of view.

 

Basically, I got lynched. Completely. The funny thing is that just about everything in the review was accurate - the audience just didn't want to hear that I thought the game was a bit crap. Within a week, I had been dragged over SO many coals on the forum, in emails and everywhere else - yes, even on other sites - that it completely and utterly destroyed my desire to write anything for MONTHS. I was really upset about it because it was such a public hanging.

 

The site's boss had to write a response to the readership, a grognard had to go through and adjust the original article and everyone had to pull out all the stops to fix my "mistake" (even though it wasn't really a mistake).

 

In the end, it passed. I focussed on editing and moderating the forum for a few months, then eventually got back to writing a little. But the scars are still there, I have to say. To this day, I will never, ever review a product in certain markets.

[OhioTom76]

I had to crop, color correct and process a whole bunch of faculty head shots for a website I was working on. The one lady who sent me her head shot had worn a dress with a really wide low cut neckline. I set up an Action in Photoshop to batch crop and save all the images for me, and when it did hers, it cropped it in such a way that all you saw was her head and her exposed upper chest and shoulders - it looked like she had posed for the picture naked, lmao. She sent me a frantic email to take the pic down, and sent me over a new one.

 

Another one was more of a social media mishap, and it was between two friends of mine. They have this running gag between the two of them that they send each other raunchy text messages throughout the day while they're at work - they try to outdo each other with something even more obscene in return. Anyhow, the one guy had just got a new smartphone and he's not really tech savvy. At one point he must of thought he was sending private messages to his friend, but he was actually posting them as public updates to all of his social media profiles through the phones built in social media widget. I was one of the people that caught it, because I figured that's what was happening when I started seeing his status updates. I called him up right away but the damage was already done, lol.

[fivebysix]

The worst messup I've had was actually with a client's website. 

 

We were not entirely sure where we were going to place the actual website so I built it on my server. I've always fancied myself as more of a graphics person so I take the most time with that and I prefer to do everything physically on my server until the website is closer to being ready.  However, this person just happened to be an actress and she had a ton of photos.  We were using a content management system to organize her entire website.  The problem came when I had to move everything from my server to her server and whatever plugin I was using to organize the photos had a strange glitch.  I ended up having reupload and recognize hundreds of photos including the captions before we could take her website live.

[simplysidy]

My disaster story... is from my early days when I took up an organization as a Team Lead. We were working on a project - an application on Visual Basic and Oracle - everything was fine until the D-Day - the entire code sets were brought on to one system the last night, compiled, tested, fixed and we created the installer and ... we let it remain on the system as the delivery was to be done at 4:00 pm the next day.

 

The next day, the hard disk crashed at around lunch and we were without any backup of the work done last night.

 

I learned - once the thing is all set and ready, dont delay. First take the backups and get those written on the CD/DVD if not on the Pen Drives. Today, I always keep at least three backups on a daily basis.

[taki]

LOL, replacing it with Pron images is super funny!

 

My worst messup was uploading a virus to my own site. DOH!!!

 

So i was brand new to the forum scene and was looking at any and all mods to add. Heck, i was going Mod crazy! I stumbled upon a mod that a user had put on a site and it looked great. I downloaded it from an untrusted source and uploaded it and installed in the site. Next thing i know, my members are PM'ing me telling me some blackhole thing was causing their browser to reject the site... so i started freaking out and tried to uninstall the stuff... couldn't. I was trying to do this as fast as i could and looking for help in all the wrong places. I ended up sending a mass email out (500 members) and told them i'm sorry about everything, but i have to completely wipe the site so i don't infect anyones computers. I lost about 15,000 posts and maybe 20 members came back.

 

It was probably the worst day of my internet existence. But, i'm back on the saddle and ready to rock!

 

I think all of us have went mod crazy a time or two at one point and time in our lives. I remember loading down Firefox with so many mod that it was slower than IE. And that was why I switched to Firefox...because IE was too slow. 

Edited July 19, 2014 by taki

[kx8]

I know this is an old thread but those disaster stories are 😱

I don't have a disaster story myself but I have an aunt who does, she worked in a bank but she wasn't really that good with computers. On her first day at work she was assigned to one computer, so she was working on it and struggling and then suddenly everything got wiped out from that computer. The good thing was she didn't get fired. She doesn't really like talking about it and I only heard it from her husband 😁