Hey everyone,
As many of you probably know, the forums went down for an extend period recently. Recently, when you visited the forums, there would be an error message telling you an error had occur, and to return to the forums later. The issue seems to have occurred only for the past couple days, but unfortunately what was causing the error was rather grave.
What happened
Quick context: I am responsible for the hosting of the Godot Community Forums and any server maintenance, data, etc.
After visiting the forums, I debugged the issue the forums was reporting. The issue the forums was giving was it was having difficulty accessing some of the data in the database the forums uses. Upon investigation, I found that almost all of the forum data in the database was missing and the database itself was corrupt. I do not know what happened exactly and I am still investigating the issue, but it appears that something triggered the database to delete itself.
After many hours of work looking through the databases, the server logs, contacting the server provider and talking with their technicians, and salvaging data in the databases, I was able to get the forums back up. The data that was successfully recovered was the discussions, questions, and comments. However, all of the other data, including users, was lost. Thankfully I had a backup of the forum data from a couple months ago, so I was able to fill in most of the gaps in the data with that backup.
However, you may notice that there are a lot of posts by a user called "UnknownUser". This is a user I created. "UnknownUser" is a placeholder for all of the discussions, questions, and comments that were salvaged but didn't have a working user ID assigned to them. Based on the data, it is estimated that roughly 500-600 discussions and around 800 comments lost their user ID. All of these discussions and comments are now assigned to "UnknownUser" for now. Additionally, around 1,000 user accounts, around 2 months of private messages, a bunch of YAGA reactions, and all of the activity log data after the backup was lost.
The important part of the forum, the discussions and comments, were mercifully able to be salvaged from the corrupt database. Any comments or discussions made by users whose account was created prior to the last couple months should see all of their posts and comments correctly attributed to them. Accounts made in the last couple months will need to be remade and their previous posts and comments will be attributed to "UnknownUser" for the time being.
Again, I am still investigating the issue and am working to protect the forums and its data so this issue cannot happen again.
What does this mean?
Well, short-term, all users should change their passwords. I do not think whatever happened was a data breach, I think it was just a deletion, but it is better to be safe than sorry. I do not know if the deletion was triggered by a malicious individual or group, or if the issue was just general database corruption. Again, I do not believe it was a data breach, but please change your password if you have an account on the forums.
Additionally, if you created a account on the forums recently, you may need to remake it. To know whether you need to remake your account, please try to reset your password by clicking "I forgot my password". This should send you an email with a password reset, though because of the increased mail traffic, please give it a few hours to send the email. If you do not receive an email a few hours after resetting your password, please make a new account.
The forums are currently back up and running like before. You should be able to interact with the forums like normal, though some functionality has been disabled while I figure out what happened.
I know this is an alarming and unfortunate situation, and I want to thank everyone for their patience and support as we figure this out moving forward. If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know! Thanks!
Update: I have a topic that was lost and is now attributed to "unknown user", how do I recover it?
Please make a new topic with the same name as the old topic, ideally linking to the old topic in the opening post of the new topic. Then please let us on forum staff know (either by using @name, private messaging, or flagging the topic and explaining) and we will see about merging the old topic into the new one.
Thanks!
