Hi readers

This site was hacked. It happens every so often with WordPress sites, but it’s usually not a very big problem. since I have a backup and can easily clean the site after the hack.

However, one hacker decided to send thousands of emails from my installation, leaving thousands of files on the server. The backup by HostGator did not run, because it deemed that there were too many files. The result being, they do not have a backup!

After urging them to look closer, they found a backup of the database, but could not find a backup of the content. In Illusex, the content equals pictures. That’s why all stories are now missing pictures.

Unfortunately my writing is nowhere near good enough for the stories to stand alone without pictures, rendering Illusex worthless and me hopeless.

However, some stories are saved in the Wayback machine, for example, this one about a dollars worth:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160903124119/http://www.illusex.org/what-a-dollar-is-worth/

Many stories are not saved there and presumably nowhere, lost forever. The stories with images are also hard to find there.

If anyone has a smart way to copy the images from wayback machine or otherwise re-establish the blog, please email me on grinch@eroslavia.org. I will never find the time to manually copy all images, so it has to be something really smart, like a homemade piece of software or something like that.

Losing Illusex sucks and not in a good way. However, in a way, I feel like I dodged a bullet, because CCC is also hosted on HostGator (for more than 10 years now!) and losing that would be unbearable.