Gallery Images

[Carmyllie]

Happy New Year to all. Can one of our esteemed moderators (or 'loftier') explain why the gallery images have now gone? I am sure there's a simple technical explanation, however it'd be a rotten feeling to start the year, feeling they'd been removed without consent from our Administrator.
Thanks in anticipation
Jenn

[admin]

Hi Jenn,
Currently investigating. There does seem to be a lot missing.
Hopefully a simple explanation.
I am away with my family visiting relatives in Brisbane for the week and this has been my first opportunity to call by.

[Derek]

Well, over a month of missing images so I have decided to delete all mine just to tidy it up a bit. A shame really as there were lots of nice and interesting comments, now all down the gurgler. A little disheartening for me when 96% of my posts mysteriously disappear. 

[admin]

The time frame of images deleted was specific and all inclusive. I have not and would not delete any images or posts. I have no explanation except that they were there, then in late December 3 image folders were somehow emptied, while others were intact.
I back up the database structure and contents but it is not practical to continually backup the images (even uninstalling the forum application has no effect on images) I can only guess at malicious access - which as much as it upset you devestates me in terms of the time and effort. Even a script to do this would be of little use, as most hosts have processor usage time limits
I had copied some of these in early-December to another directory in order to create an end-of-year retrospective image wall.
These can be copied back and do include the time stamps, but the file names have both a pre-fix and a suffix extension, so it is not a simple matter to sort them by date into the correct folders to enable the link paths to work....more of a one at a time tedious process. Even then, the thumbnails generated at upload would be missing.
I will get to this task, but it represents many hours that I just do not have free at the moment.
I can only apologise and hope we can move forward in the meantime.