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  2. Please see the following thread for more information
    XLN's future is looking bad
New Members Urgent help needed if we are to live on

Why Did The Old Xln Website Get Deleted?

Discussion in 'General Forum' started by Dictatorce, Jan 3, 2015.

  1. Dictatorce

    Dictatorce Vagabond

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    Why did they delete the old website? Were the mods that was posted in there deleted too?
     
  2. Pamascus27

    Pamascus27 Mayor

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    Simply because it was broken in many ways which was supposed to be fixed by Hyperwolf, the founder of XLN, but wasn't because he has gone inactive and lost interest of CitiesXL. Also XLN was revealed to be hacked for a long time already before Icy found out about it. We then decided to launch a whole new website with IcyHot, who provided the servers to Hyperwolf for free to run XLN, doing most of the job.

    After announcing the new website in the old site, Icy then proceeded to put down the old XLN because of the dangers of keeping it online for more period of time. While he did that, we were in the middle of migrating mods and tutorials from the old XLN to the new. We were still able to migrate around 98 % of the mods and tutorials despite the job being harder. But many of the threads weren't migrated over to the new XLN, which shouldn't annoy people so much.

    As things became normal again, we were able to be as successful if not, better than the old XLN. Thanks to IcyHot, XLN
    continues to thrive for the years to come, to be the CitiesXL and city building game site that it always was. :)
     
    The Funky Monk likes this.
  3. IcyHot

    IcyHot Administrator
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    Pam said it pretty clearly.

    Here is my take. What happened is that the XLEX portion of XLNation was custom code written by a user named "user" circa 2011. Sadly he vanished shortly after creating the code that became a pivotal part of XLNation. This resulted in a problem. Hyperwolf could not safely upgrade the main software running XLNation called Drupal without risking breaking the XLEX where all the mods were stored. For whatever reason he did not want to take on the challenge of figuring out the custom code. Since Drupal was not being properly maintained, and kept up to date on security fixes, the website was exposed to being hacked. In May 2014 XLNation was hacked with malware. Sites in Russia and Paris effectively took control of the server through a Drupal vulnerability sending large amounts of data to those locations. My ISP threatened to suspend internet service at my company. Since XLNation runs on my own server also hosting my company website I finally stepped into the fire. There were two options: a) force Hyperwolf to move the website elsewhere or 2) Try to salvage the mess it was in.

    I elected to salvage XLNation. Hyperwolf gave up control to me. By August 2014 XLNation was falling apart. The website was compromised, no users had been able to properly register in about 4 months. The costs involved to hire a dedicated data migration service along with a compromised databases resulted in the decision to manually migrate the Mods, Patches, Tutorials etc. A new web server was purchased with fancy SSD Drives. I and about 10 dedicated users migrated all the mods, patches etc. XLNation now runs on modern properly maintained software running code that is supported by professional developers.

    The last piece of the puzzle remains to be solved. I am still waiting on Hyperwolf to get me access to the domain registrar of XLNation. He can't remember the userid and password and the Domain needs to be re-renewed by June 2015. Hopefully he comes through and can provide me the login credentials needed to renew the domain registration.

    Lessons Learned:

    1. All Critical components of XLNation: Forums, Resources (XLEX) and Media are professional software maintained and supported by the developer of XenFORO. Never again will XLNation be "stuck" due to critical code at the heart of the website not being maintained.

    2. All security fixes for the Server OS, as well as the Website itself are properly maintained and updated.

    3. The website is backed up daily (Trust me Hyperwolf never did backups). Each week the previous weekly backups are migrated to an external location.
     
    Pamascus27 likes this.
  4. Pamascus27

    Pamascus27 Mayor

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    Damn thats really informative Icy, thanks for explaining it more in-depth. (y)
     
  5. MuxLee

    MuxLee Executive

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    you can find the administrative contact from whois , and then contact your registrar to validate your id different isp 's have different rules but you should be able to do it
     
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