(Topic ID: 208300)

pinwiki - web hosting problem

By smiley

6 years ago


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  • 288 posts
  • 84 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 1 year ago by PinWiz2180
  • Topic is favorited by 18 Pinsiders

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    There are 288 posts in this topic. You are on page 1 of 6.
    #1 6 years ago

    what happened to pinwiki, no longer works?

    #3 6 years ago

    Thankfully I had the system 80 page up on my phone and was able to save it.

    #4 6 years ago

    That really sucks.

    #5 6 years ago

    Not this again.. it’s got a “suspended account” message, which means either a late payment or a (obviously BS) copyright claim

    #6 6 years ago

    Hope this can be fixed! I would be lost without it.

    #7 6 years ago

    Noooooo, hope they are back soon!

    #8 6 years ago

    The whois page for the domain shows an expiration date for 4/21/18, so it's not a problem with the domain name. Looks like it's a problem with the host.

    Does anyone know who runs the site? I think the guy's username on pinwiki was PinballWizard, but I'm not 100% sure without being able to look.

    #9 6 years ago

    I believe it was founded by a Casey Gardner, not sure if he still runs it

    #10 6 years ago

    Digging into it further, the account was not actually suspended.

    It looks like the website was actually hacked. The page is attempting to redirect to a known malicious site in the background.

    Any mirrors of the site out there, by any chance? The site has a robots.txt blocking crawlers, so it doesn't seem to be cached anywhere.

    #11 6 years ago
    Quoted from ForceFlow:

    Digging into it further, the account was not actually suspended.
    It looks like the website was actually hacked. The page is attempting to redirect to a known malicious site in the background.
    Any mirrors of the site out there, by any chance? The site has a robots.txt blocking crawlers, so it doesn't seem to be cached anywhere.

    Oh no! The webhost should have backups

    #12 6 years ago
    Quoted from Rdoyle1978:

    Oh no! The webhost should have backups

    Yeah, but there's sometimes a ticking clock on that.

    I did manage to find that archive.org had some of the wiki cached from 7 months ago. A bunch of newer pages are missing, and 7 months of content isn't there, but sans other options, that could at least be a starting point to rebuild from in the worst case scenario.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20171025182113/http://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/

    #13 6 years ago
    Quoted from ForceFlow:

    Yeah, but there's sometimes a ticking clock on that.
    I did manage to find that archive.org had some of the wiki cached from 7 months ago. A bunch of newer pages are missing, and 7 months of content isn't there, but sans other options, that could at least be a starting point to rebuild from in the worst case scenario.
    http://web.archive.org/web/20171025182113/http://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/

    It’s also possible they still have all the content in the db, but the web server has been hacked just not to show it. Let’s hope! Thank goodness for the internet archive

    #14 6 years ago

    Has anyone posted to the facebook groups to see about getting in touch with the guy and giving him a heads up about the site?

    #15 6 years ago

    "There are top men working on this." I'm told that it should be back up shortly.

    Jim

    #16 6 years ago

    I sent an email to Casey last night. He manages the site. No response yet.
    --
    Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
    http://ChrisHiblerPinball.com/contact
    http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info

    #17 6 years ago
    Quoted from Gott_Lieb:

    "There are top men working on this."

    "Who?"
    "Top. Men."

    19
    #18 6 years ago

    Hey everyone, its Casey (founder, owner, manager) of PinWiki.com. I am almost never on PinSide, so I apologize for not getting back to everyone until this morning on this. I knew of the issue last night, but I didn't know of this thread until it was shown to me by Jim. It's probably about time I did a "State of The Wiki" address soon, its been years, and I will work on that one here soon. In the meantime to address this thread, there was a hijacking issue of the website, that led it to getting suspended. We have since fixed the issue of the hijack, and found the root cause of the security hole that caused it in the first place. With that said, I'm waiting on our web host to reactivate the account so we can go back online, should be up and running shortly. With that said, we may spend the next few days in a "read only" state as I do a more thorough audit of the website to make sure everything is good to go. At that point, content will be viewable, just won't be able to edit for a few days. With all that said, we are not gone, we haven't gone anywhere, and we will not be going anywhere When I created PinWiki I made a promise to the community, we were here to stay and that has not changed!

    As for the mention of backups/mirrors/web crawlers... We do regular backups on our own, as well as the web host in case something happens. PinWiki is coming up on 7 years online now, and we all would be DEVASTATED if that were to be lost. We take many precautions to make sure that if something catastrophic happens to the server or data, that we can put it all back together with (minimal at most) loss. A rollback to a backup may lose a day or two of changes, but not 7 years. This was a core value at the founding of the website.

    At this time, we do not have any good mirrors of the website at this time that are publicly hosted. Our track record for the past 7 years has been quite good minus 2-3 growing pain hiccups that shut the site off temporarily (our longest outage was 3 days, and that was in a transitional period where I moved the website to better handle traffic). When we first started we were running 2 mirrors of the website as a "just in case" factor, to help ease the community in that the information wasn't going anywhere, but mirroring the website was a TON of work, and I think we can agree that we have a proven track record at this point.

    Lastly, in reference to web crawlers. I originally did not want to put up a robots.txt to block web crawling, however as the site has gained popularity, the web crawlers were indexing the site more and more frequently. At the beginning that was all well and good, but the traffic push it was creating became detrimental to the website. Mediawiki, which the website is built upon, is not very efficient, especially as the site grows, and the crawlers were slowing down requests on the site to an unusable rate. I know the argument that Wikipedia uses mediawiki and millions of people use that site. They have a MUCH bigger team behind the scenes and multiple data centers of servers to run their site. PinWiki does not have that same luxury. Fortunately, I do have some upgrades possible if growth happens to the point where we run into additional performance issues, but traffic flow wise, PinWiki has leveled out overall and I do not foresee this being an issue. So while it is unfortunate the web crawlers do not have the entire site locked away nicely for days like today, it was done for a reason, and not to hide the contents away from others.

    As I mentioned earlier, I'm not often on Pinside, but I will try to check in on this thread if you all have any further questions. If there is ever an emergency situation going on and you need to contact me, Jim and Chris Hibler both have contact info for me to track me down, as evidenced by Jim showing me this thread.

    Casey

    #19 6 years ago

    Sweet. Thank you for all the hard work making certain the information on the site continues, even if the internet breaks.

    #21 6 years ago

    Just an FYI, site is back up and running.

    #22 6 years ago
    Quoted from PinWiz2180:

    site is back up and running

    Awesome, thanks!

    #23 6 years ago

    Great news!!

    #24 6 years ago
    Quoted from PinWiz2180:

    Lastly, in reference to web crawlers. I originally did not want to put up a robots.txt to block web crawling, however as the site has gained popularity, the web crawlers were indexing the site more and more frequently. At the beginning that was all well and good, but the traffic push it was creating became detrimental to the website.

    I'd recommend just selectively allowing a few, such as the crawler for archive.org and possibly google, so the site is archived occasionally, and visitors can find info on the site who aren't familiar with it. Most people new to pinball in the last few years have no idea pinwiki exists, especially in the facebook groups.

    I'd suggest something like this:

    User-agent: archive.org_bot
    Disallow:
    
    User-agent: ia_archiver
    Disallow:
    
    User-agent: Googlebot
    Disallow:
    
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /
    

    The first two are for archive.org, and the last one is the google search crawler.

    #25 6 years ago
    Quoted from PinWiz2180:

    At this time, we do not have any good mirrors of the website at this time that are publicly hosted. Our track record for the past 7 years has been quite good minus 2-3 growing pain hiccups that shut the site off temporarily (our longest outage was 3 days, and that was in a transitional period where I moved the website to better handle traffic). When we first started we were running 2 mirrors of the website as a "just in case" factor, to help ease the community in that the information wasn't going anywhere, but mirroring the website was a TON of work, and I think we can agree that we have a proven track record at this point.

    It's great that you've been able to do this for so long and have an excellent uptime record. I've found it to be a very valuable resource and have contributed a fair amount to it in the last few years.

    However, this situation was a bit of a scare. If something should happen to the host, domain, or even you--that's all a single point of failure with no backups in place that someone can has access to besides yourself.

    Since it is such a great repository of knowledge, I'd just feel a lot better if there is at least one secondary archive/mirror/backup that someone else can access in the event of a catastrophic failure of the site.

    #26 6 years ago

    I will look at the adjustments for the web crawler. But I do like the suggestions and will most likely implement them.

    As for backups/point of failure/event that I die tomorrow, there are multiple layers of protection implemented behind the scenes. Call me paranoid but login info, payment info, how to transfer the site, etc. is well documented and stored away, that in the event it happens, a “break glass in case of emergency” setup so to speak has been put together within the brain trust. The initial design principals of the site was always designed so that there was never a “single point of failure”. It’s just not wildly public, and part of my “state of the wiki” I can address this in more detail. Rest assured, things are protected and we aren’t going anywhere even if I decide to hate pinball and everyone in it

    #27 6 years ago

    A good reminder to help send some $$$ their way if you like/use pinwiki.

    paypal to:
    [email protected]

    I just sent a small donation.

    #28 6 years ago

    I just tried to go to pinwiki from a Google search page, and it is most definitely still hacked.

    I "won" all kinds of gift cards and awards...

    Closed my browser and cleared all my cache.

    Just wanted to let you guys know to be on the lookout, something is still infected

    #29 6 years ago

    Glad this got squared away. Love the site and use it a ton. Huge thanks Casey for your contributions.

    #30 6 years ago

    I work for Sucuri.net, and they should be able to clear all your malware very quickly and on the cheap cheap

    #31 6 years ago

    Didn't Securi get bought by Godaddy?
    One thing I would like to know. On their "website scanner" badge -- what is the significance of the drawing of a washing machine with a green check mark in the middle?

    Securi_Washing_Machine (resized).jpgSecuri_Washing_Machine (resized).jpg

    #32 6 years ago
    Quoted from G-P-E:

    Didn't Securi get bought by Godaddy?
    One thing I would like to know. On their "website scanner" badge -- what is the significance of the drawing of a washing machine with a green check mark in the middle?

    That's... uh.. supposed to be a browser window. In Mac, because of the top bar.

    Either that, or your socks are ready.

    #33 6 years ago

    #warmsocks

    #34 6 years ago
    Quoted from G-P-E:

    Didn't Securi get bought by Godaddy?
    One thing I would like to know. On their "website scanner" badge -- what is the significance of the drawing of a washing machine with a green check mark in the middle?

    Lol, yes, we got acquired by GD. Can’t answer for the washing machine, just know you won’t get malware in it hehe

    1 month later
    #35 6 years ago

    I am still getting re-directed every once in a while. It may be malware on my end. Anyone else?

    #36 6 years ago

    No issues here. Works like a hose.

    Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
    http://ChrisHiblerPinball.com/contact/
    http://www.PinWiki.com - The new place for pinball repair info

    #37 6 years ago

    It's been working fine for me.

    #38 6 years ago

    i saw someone on facebook saying pinwiki redirects them to spam / malware page. seems OK for me.

    #39 6 years ago

    Possibly browser has things cached from when you did visit it last? Try clearing all cache/local storage for the site?

    #40 6 years ago

    Working fine for me. Not like a hose though. ChrisHibler do you have a trick hose for pin repair?

    Quoted from ChrisHibler:

    No issues here. Works like a hose.

    1 week later
    #41 5 years ago

    I was on the site two days ago and today the malware site popped up

    #42 5 years ago
    Quoted from eh97ac:

    I was on the site two days ago and today the malware site popped up

    If you go down one level using a google link, you get past that. It's only on the main page.

    But yeah, the site is still infected with a redirect that takes you to malware sites (multiple, seemingly at random).

    #43 5 years ago

    Nope, everything is redirected now

    #44 5 years ago

    Yup, redirects me too...

    I pm'd Casey and Chris... don't have their e-mail.
    Hopefully Casey is already aware.

    Screenshot_20180322-181743 (resized).pngScreenshot_20180322-181743 (resized).png

    #45 5 years ago

    Is someone editing the wiki with crap code that redirects to malware so the webhost shut down the website? Is that even possible?

    #46 5 years ago

    Thanks for the heads up. Casey is on it.
    --
    Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
    http://ChrisHiblerPinball.com/contact
    http://www.PinWiki.com - The new place for pinball repair info

    #47 5 years ago

    Looks like Pinwiki is back up again...Thanks to all involved in turning it around quickly!

    1 year later
    #48 4 years ago

    BTW the Google search for this page is still hijacked. It shows up as "pinwiki.com" in results but if you right-click on it Google shows you the actual URL which is:
    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjkntarx8DhAhXFuFkKHTErCY0QFjAAegQIBhAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpinwiki.com%2F&usg=AOvVaw0_AAvqQLzD_9qqmc_dPaEM

    So someone has not really fixed the issue at Pinwiki.com. Here's a handy thread from the Google forums on what to do:
    https://support.google.com/webmasters/forum/AAAA2Jdx3sU6dPdJhz7nYc/?hl=en&gpf=d/topic/webmasters/6dPdJhz7nYc

    #50 4 years ago

    I can't use the pinwiki from my phone . Most of the time as it loads the page gets hijacked by some warning page or congrations you're a winner page.

    There are 288 posts in this topic. You are on page 1 of 6.

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