Hey, folks. I missed that there was a critical vulnerability in Ghost that needed to get patched. A script kiddie used the vulnerability to delete basically all the posts on the blog.
I had backups enabled, but unfortunately they only go back 28 days or so and the attack happened in mid-April. I did have a backup from January 2023 that I could roll back to, so much of the old content was rescued.
However, there are a bunch of posts from 2023 that were not in the backup. However, luckily Archive.org has a scrape of MEW as current as January 2026, including all the images as far as I can tell.
If you are willing and able, please reupload your posts from 2023 (backdating accordingly). Here is the snapshot: Most Epic Win on Archive.org.
I might look at exporting the blog as a static site so that it can be kept for posterity without being catnip for skids. For now, I’ll just update Ghost more regularly.
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In addition to these fools being irritating and causing you stress, it’s a bit sad that the last posts to the blog were from 2023. And also that none of us noticed that the blog had been trashed back in April already. 
Will see what I can put back up later today hopefully. And maybe recreate some of my more recent update posts and new threads from the forum here.
@SIGSTART, for those replications, to avoid duplicate threads, instead of releasing the MewBot threads here can I just add a link in the blog post that points to the existing thread? In fact, can that be a possible workflow in the future?
For example, I recently added info about the upcoming Planet Zoo 2 release to the existing Planet Zoo thread. Could I replicate that post as a small blog article and manually link it back to the forum thread and simply not release the MewBot thread that gets created?
The Summer Games Thread is example of a completely new thread that I can put into a blog post too. With the same approach - forum thread duplicated as a blog post with a link to the forum, MewBot ignored (or even deleted to avoid cluttering things with a bunch of unreleased thread topics?)
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That all sounds fine to me. Do you need me to implement something on my side?
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I can keep thinking I should write a few more blog posts. Just life keeps being busy. Will look at what I can put together. Just glad that the site is back up and running again.
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Should be okay. Life Forza Horizon got the better of me yesterday. Will give it the old college try today though. Will shout if I have problems.
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Can I ask one of you geniuses to see if you can rescue mine? (Im clueless!)
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Spoke too soon, I am going to need your help… Ghost is not letting me login or reset my password. Something iffy with the user / subscriber / author data I guess.
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Tried with the old greg@redd email address as well - that one says “user not found”.
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Tried the “Sign in” option from the blog main page. Got the “If you have an account, an email has been sent to [email protected]”. Needless to say I never got that.
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Tried signing up as a new user with the same write.gregredd@gmail account. Got a “Failed to sign up, please try again” popup error.
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Tried signing up with a total new unused on MEW email address, got the same error message.
No harm in asking 
But at this point, it ain’t working for me at all. Need someone else who had posting rights to see if they can access the Ghost backend.
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Meh, I’ve obviously misconfigured SES. I’ll try to fix it, but will manually reset your password in the meantime.
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I was locked out too (they’ve got a basic default 2FA thing going now via email), so I had to fix the SES config.
Looks like I was just sending from the wrong region (so much for the wonders of The Cloud™).
I was able to log in but the site was really slow for me (so you might have to be patient at the verification step).
Please test that you can log in now?
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Immediately got the “You must reset password, we’re sending you an email with instructions” message. Email with password reset link arrived immediately too. Password reset and I’m in the Ghost backend now. All seems good.
I’m trying to work out what article’s are missing. Is it everything (if anything) from the beginning of 2024-ish?
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It is everything from the beginning of 2023, with the exception of one of your articles which I was able to salvage from the remnants of the hacked blog.
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So, does that mean we have made it big if we are hacking targets? 
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Yeah, typo-ed that, sorry.
It’s actually a fair number of articles then. I think 2023 was the last year we did that posting challenge.
All the Mewbot posts are still listed here so we can see exactly what was posted and is now missing. Will go start trawling through the Archive, try figure out the most sensible way to do this, and will add stuff back as I can.
Saving this Archive link here for me to test with later: My Precious! The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
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Okay, so I can get things working okay. Couple of issues and thoughts please.
Redid two - one of mine and one of @Wyvern’s.
On mine, I copied the images from Archive and reposted them into the article on MEW. Then went and found one of the two videos from YT and re-embedded it.
I couldn’t figure out what the other was and that’s the first issue: I can’t see a way on the Archive post to check what the original YT video was. Video’s on Archive are kept on the site there and play through a dedicated video player.
On Wyvern’s post I left the images still linked to the Archive file as they all seemed to load correctly. I also left the video in place - it has the message overlay on it.
So, opinions please:
(1) do we copy images back into MEW and re-add video links that we can find directly from YouTube? or;
(2) do we just leave everything pointing back to Archive.org? (The only image that has to be manually downloaded and re-upload correctly is the Feature Image).
(1) is the better way to do it but will take a bit longer; hotlinking in (2) is a little less work and may be a small bit quicker, but also pretty cheeky, and is a lot riskier if anything changes on the Archive site, and may cause all sorts of slow site responses and issues if Archive.org is unreachable/slow itself.
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I know it’s extra work, but reuploading the images and embedding the video links properly is the way to go.
Even if folks only reupload one of their articles per day, we’ll soon have them all back.
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Mr Redd if you tell me what to do and how I can start with mine tomorrow
It’s pretty much a copy & paste thing really.
- Log in to your account on Ghost.
- Create a new post.
- Go over to the Archive.org site and find the article you want to redo.
- Save all the images in that to a local drive.
- Copy the whole thing and paste it into your new post on Ghost. It should copy over all the same formatting and blocks.
- Replace the images with the ones you saved (the c&p images will be pulled from Archive if you don’t).
- If you have video’s in your post, see if you can find the video on YouTube and replace the Archive version with a YT block with the link in it. If you can’t find the video, replace it with another related one, or just scrap it altogether.
- Add the Feature Image at the top of the main posting screen - that’s the image that’ll be used as a thumbnail on the blog home page and the directory, and as the wide banner image at the top of your post, between the Excerpt and the article text itself.
- Speaking of the Excerpt, open the Post Settings menu on the right-hand side.
- Change the publish date to the original (easiest just to type it in), add the excerpt bit that appears under the title, and any tags if you want.
- And publish it.
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@SIGSTART as a side thought while I’m flicking between here and there… is there anyway to add a link up there 
next to the Discord link to get to the blog from here?
Something like:
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@Sigstart When trying to find a topic I deleted that I meant to save to drafts, I saw this info on the dashboard:
Looks like you need to run another update, on the Discourse end this time.
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