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

Just an FYI, site is back up and running.

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

Hey all. It's Casey. Long story short, a long while ago (I guess when this thread originally started?) there was compromise hit in the backend software that runs the wiki. Thought I had it fully cleaned up, turns out something got missed somewhere. I've also been behind on doing some upgrades (stability, security, and features). Took the time to take care of everything at once. This was no small feat, as the database for the wiki is BIG, and that doesn't include all the uploads. To make sure this was a CLEAN install with nothing lingering, the whole software side of things was from a fresh install.

With all of that going on, several changes have occurred. The most important one was getting off an older version of MediaWiki (the software behind the curtain). Honestly, I had been putting this off as the version we were running vs. the latest stable had multiple incompatibilities to work through preventing a direct upgrade path, but I was able to work through it. Secondly, we are now running a mobile native theme. If you are on desktop, you aren't going to notice a difference, but on mobile, things lay out a lot better for smaller screens. So far in testing, I have not had any issues, however I will call the mobile theming a "beta" experience at the moment until more people get digging into it. Lastly, we are now forcing HTTPS. We have supported it for over a year or so, but now we are defaulting to it. Last time I put a MediaWiki site onto HTTPS required, there were a few speed bumps in getting all extensions and even the base install to run 100%. With that said, on my test platforms, everything is now smoothly working. I have some more minor upgrades this week that are planned, mostly adding some extensions to increase functionality, speed of website, and add a few new features. Everything should be "complete" by November 10th. In the mean time, you may see messages on the site about it being "read-only" or down for an upgrade. 99% of the time if one of these situations are occurring then the index page will have a banner on it stating such. If there are no "warning" messages up, and you encounter an issue, that would be bad, so please let me know!

With all of this said, I do not normally frequent Pinside, but I will spend this week and next checking in on this thread to see if anyone has any further issues. If you find anything wrong, reply in this thread or PM me.

I do appreciate the heads up on the matter (shoutout to Chris Hibler and JT Amusements). PinWiki was started way back in 2011, and has grown way bigger than I ever expected it to. Its now nearly the end of 2019, and we have really lived up to our slogan, "THE place for everything pinball". As always, we run on the occasional donation, and mostly the money out of my own pocket as a hobby. I made a promise to the community 8 years ago that PinWiki was (and still is) here to stay, and that has not changed, and the pipeline has a few things in it to keep PinWiki growing. We greatly appreciate everyone who has contributed to the site (both in donations and in information).

Ken, I have noticed that and GREATLY appreciate it! I personally am going to be trying to populate more information for some of the newer manufacturers as we can, but some of these games have been hard to track down locally to get the detailed information.

While I'm thinking of it. Any features anyone is looking for on the wiki? Now is the time to speak while I'm playing with feature additions.

Also, no problem ForceFlow! I see your name regularly in the edits too. Greatly appreciated!

PinWiki performance and page load time should be SIGNIFICANTLY better now too. Spent some time optimizing the database and setting up some new items that help with page generation. Once again, if you find anything that doesn't seem to load right or anything of that nature, let me know. I did some extensive testing before pushing any of these updates to production, but it doesn't mean I didn't miss a minor detail anywhere.

Durzel, are you still experiencing this as of today?

Just as I haven't been able to cause it on my end, can someone give me details of OS, browser, etc.? Really wanna get this squashed.

Thanks for the info, let me see what I can do.

Durzel, I was able to replicate based on your info you gave me earlier. I'm working on a few things related to it now.

I *think* we have this squashed. Took a LOT of time reviewing files to make sure nothing was left over malicious. I can't find anything else lingering, and can't cause it to happen anymore. If anyone has it happen again, let me know immediately. Beefed up some security items while I was at it. Things seem to be back on track and running smooth. Appreciate the help from all. Especially on this one, as like I've said I struggled to replicate the problem for some reason on my daily setup, so getting detailed info from some of you guys helped me to SEE the problem.

Sorry, last 2 weeks I've had multiple personal emergencies come up, that have pulled me away from both PinWiki work as well as even making it on here to let you all know. Site is expected to be 100% inaccessible at some point this week as I seem to have found root cause of issue, but will require a full shut off of site for a day or two to get it taken care of. I appreciate the help offers (I have had 2 different cyber security/DevOps types offer to help). If I ran into another snafu after this go round, I will be in touch with you guys who offered.

Ken, I have uploads temporarily disabled, when I get things ironed out through this week, uploads will go back on. Sorry for the hassle.

It's Casey making a stop in. Newest blog post was just added: https://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blog

I don't get here much, but now that PinWiki is 100% again, I am going to try and stop in for some Q&A if anyone has anything. If I miss it, Chris usually directs it my way.

I've said it before, but it's one of those things that doesn't feel like you can say it enough. Thank you everyone for your patience on the matter as we worked to resolve it. It honestly means the world to me.

No problem! As it's more or less mentioned, I want PinWiki to be around for the next 10 years! And the 10 after that...and after that.... Basically as long as we are relevant to exist on the web, we want to be there!

Because we have a better suited team to move forward on this now and not have issues like this again, and we in our committee don't want to hand this off to someone else and lose control of it. If we hand it off to another group to run it, we have zero control if it continues to exist, what their intentions are going forward, etc. Do I trust Pinside to not have nefarious intentions? Yeah at face value, they seem like great people. If we hand it over and tomorrow they decide that pinball is no longer their hobby and they pull the plug on it, we are going to be at the same spot we were 9 years ago with very little pinball repair information available.

In the end its my word of keeping it going vs anyone else's. You can trust my commitment to keeping it going or you don't have to, but at least at this point we have the core group that has been around since the beginning still supporting this, and I think that attests to the fact we aren't going anywhere. I can't correct the past, but I can correct the future on it.

With all of that said, we have systems in place to make the future better than the past has ever been. Our team is still running daily security checks. I still run regular back ups, and we have behind the scenes "disaster recovery" that is put in place in case anything from the host disappearing to me dying tomorrow. Trust can only be rebuilt with action and not speeches, so I do ask patience to see this going forward.

I can't speak directly for Chris Hibler, but he is actually retiring from his day job, and it seems he may be committing more of his time to getting information restructured, cleaned up, and generally easier to read. Ken Layton has been patiently waiting on file uploads that are now active again, as he has been graciously documenting some of the more modern and more obscure stuff.

Aware of the issue, but still tracking down the root cause. We have been having this on and off for several weeks now, and have been collecting some timestamps to check logs, but so far nothing has been a smoking gun yet. I will be pushing some updates through this week that I am hoping will be a final fix.