I have rebuilt the site
All my websites were hit by a malware attack on Monday, it destroyed the Steeple, Bobbins.horse and Bad Machinery sites, and even the Scary Go Round placeholder site. Fixing it would have been very expensive and wasn’t worth it, my terrible web of under-maintained WordPress sites was doubtless to blame. So I am taking the opportunity to tidy things up. I will be archiving all the finished comics with super-light flat HTML websites, and putting any new comics up here.
My intention is to eventually migrate this site away from WordPress too, but speed was of the essence in getting it back up and WP has a lot of convenient functionality that I don’t have time to replace at the moment.
Unfortunately all the old comments, comic titles and descriptions were lost. I can go though on Wayback Machine and copy the titles and descriptions back but I suspect this will be a job for when I am delayed at the airport for twelve hours, as it will be slightly thankless.
It will take me a little while to restore the Steeple and Bobbins.horse sites as I am using a new CMS for those and there is design work to be done. But once I write a few scripts to help me bulk import comics, I should be able to make new archival sub-sites for Destroy History and any other orphan children.
Aw man that sucks. Really sucks that the internet was made a systematically hostile space where it takes steady vigilance and busy-work to keep something good alive.
I hope whoever was ultimately responsible for the malware attack receives a visit from a very angry Reverend Penrose.
maybe do a complete series reposting with commentary, like Girls with Slingshots, Go Get a Roomie, Gaia from the creators of Sandra and Woo, and Octopus PIe have all done. Oh!!! And the original Walkyverse comics.
Sign me up for this too! I would love to take a nice measured walk down memory lane.
It is not a thankless task. I thank you for everything you do to keep these sites up and stocked with comics, and for whatever improvements you make. And I suspect I speak for many others.
Amen.
Amen
That is extremely sucky.
Oh yuck. I have to believe it’s some automated malware net, because who could possibly be enough of an asshole to target your sites directly (other than perhaps a certain estate with no sense of humor)?
Yes, this is my feeling too. I struggle to imagine a person who could have the animus to want to wreck the websites of a minor figure in 21st century comics. Even the angriest and most disenchanted commenters on my websites (a rare breed in themselves) just seem to betray a deep personal sadness looking for an outlet.
A minor figure? A MINOR figure? You, sir, are a giant! You’re a king!
You know what I mean, I’m not XKCD or Raina Telgemeier or Alice Oseman. I represent a pretty innocuous target.
I’ve seen far more minor targets get deliberately attacked, though. You never know what will set off the sort of sad mind that would do something like this.
I jiust want to say I have zero idea who any of those people are.
They’ve all sold millions of books. Millions.
Jeez Louise, “Garfield” sold millions too. I don’t think you really want to be compared to “Glarefied” or Alice Oseman or XKCD which I just looked at with a creeping sense of horror. Or was it just a crappy sense of horrible.
Big Barbarian, man. They’re after ya.
I’m so sorry that all of this has happened. I suspect that one could write a Python script to do the copying from the Wayback Machine; I asked Gemini to do it and it returned something that looks like it might work with a bit of noodling.
Nick is it very nice that you have looked into this at all. History tells me that I will never have time to see such a process through.
That sounds like an excellent opportunity for Destroy History!
Actually, on second thought, with Shelley’s track record, the comments would end up being preserved properly, but the comics themselves would be irrecoverable. So maybe let’s not do that.
These villains wiped out 5+ years of our best jokes and commentary. It’s on like Donkey Kong now.
That’s OK. It means I can re-use my best lines!
I am sorry to hear about this. It has been an unfortunate few months for you.
The unfortunate few months started in about 2018-19 but I am hopeful that this was the last one (winces).
Is there anything we could do as a community? Perhaps transcribe all of the titles onto a big shared spreadsheet, or similar?
I managed to save al the Solver and Steeple titles and can re-enter those using a script I wrote, so don’t worry. If I think of anything the community can do, I will put out al call!