For anyone who’s been under a rock over the past few months, Pijoo took quite a beating when a large scale hacking attempt led to a server melt-down (the server killed itself as a security measure) and some of the content was unrecoverable from back-ups. To make matters worse, one of our local machines, which held the recent back-ups was also attacked (since the server attack originated from an FTP hack on that machine) taking that down too.
We were left with a dilemma; re-build the broken site or start again from scratch. We chose the latter, and quickly threw together a new bare-bones service which you see today (it’s worth mentioning that at no time was the database at any risk, just uploads such as user avatars, and some back-end scripts).
As a result, Pijoo is now 100% content driven, which means the blog directory has been dropped in favour of a stronger emphasis on actual posts. We added post sharing a while back but it always took a back seat to blog sharing, which in our humble opinion provides less incentive for visitors than finding interesting new content that the new site provides.
Because the new service is so different, we decided not to transfer the old accounts across, but to re-invite people in and delete the old accounts forever, since assuming our old user-base would welcome the changes is a bit unfair.
We also had some email problems with the new mail-server, so if you didn’t get an invite to the new site, you can rest-assured that we no longer hold any of your information, and it was never at risk from the hackers, but we’d love to see you come back and help us rebuild what was a great community.
We’ll be adding new features to the site over the next few weeks, so as always, your input (and your patience) is greatly appreciated.
Thanks from all the team at Pijoo