Hey there, just recreated my account here on the new forum. I just wanted to ask if there will be any further updates about what caused the data loss on the old forum, or have efforts to investigate this hit and dead end? Not trying to put pressure on anyone and I appreciate all the contributors and moderators have been working hard to get this new forum up and running - I just picked up on this part of the announcement about the demise of the old forum:
We don’t yet know the root cause for sure, but our service provider speculated it might have been due to a botched update.
Was it an update of Discourse at a 3rd party provider that caused this? I saw on the Manjaro twitter feed that somebody involved in the Endeavour forums had also experienced [something similar] with their install of Discourse (https://twitter.com/AlpixTM/status/1293511272714194944).
I was also picked up on the mention of security here:
The missing files left the forum in a rather unpleasant state, and it could not be cleaned to a satisfactory condition. Therefore we decided to start from scratch on a new platform to ensure functionality and security of the forum.
Is there any indication that the security of the old forum was compromised, or any other part of the Manjaro infrastructure? Now I trust the team enough to disclose breaches and such responsibly, but I think it’s useful to just spell it out and eliminate these possibilities even if the answer is otherwise ‘obvious’ to those in the know. Especially considering how long some minor issues in the past keep being brought up by Manjaro detractors, it would be good to get ahead of further damaging rumours, especially if nothing serious has transpired. Not that it matters, or that it’s surprising, but I came across a bit of rumour mongering already.
Don’t want this to come across as hostile or unappreciative at all, just figured it was worth raising plainly!
It seems there is a real concern at individual level, but we can’t reply to each person. Respectfully i will have to point out to some related discussions with some answers, that might or not satisfy your query:
There are a couple more topics that might interest you
Hi @bogdancovaciu, I saw all those and read them before making my post but actually missed the last one about the ‘Swear Box’, because I couldn’t find the ‘General’ section at all, had been looking for it actually (my guess is I have to unlock access to it via Discourse by interacting more on the forum).
Your post there does go towards answering my question, so thank you for that (the first part especially):
I’m sure that by having the issue with the forum was frustrating and concerning for all of us, but that didn’t affected in any way the OS, packages, updates or the ISO files. I would not worry about that at all.
The exact issue with the “old” forum is unknown even to bytemark that kindly got us with that server for long time. Nothing conclusive, just that no reliable recovery was possible, and after 3 days trying, we decided to go 100% fresh.
Just wanted to respond to this part though:
I did not mean to raise this solely due to my individual concerns, but also as a part of the community. My only feedback would be that maybe something like your statements in that thread would be great to have included in an official announcement, perhaps here on the forum, on Twitter and anywhere else Manjaro has an active presence, just to clarify that the Manjaro team’s infrastructure and packages were not affected and was separate from Bytemark’s own setup.
Figure that many people are more concerned and aware about cyber/data security in recent years. Such reassurances are especially import in a time where many of us are now working from home and thus have to also ensure our workplace’s data is reasonably secure on our systems.
Well, i just share what i was able to understand from a very, very, very long discussion, while the more experienced in all this did all was possible to get somewhere. For me was like assisting to a brain surgery.
Indeed we got feedback from others that got into same troubles, so there might be something to look forward regarding Discourse, but we also considered a faulty update and a possible hardware failure.
