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The DesignCommunity forums database system experienced serious technical damage overnight. The system has been restored from backups and was viewable by 10:30am PDT, and supports posting as well as of 11:45am, PDT.

The timing of this breakdown fell into a nasty, worst-case-senario gap between our daily and weekly system backups. As a result, nearly an entire week of your vaulable contributions has been lost. We regret this extremely.

To the extent possible, we invite you to repost any questions, answers, information, classified ads, or other appropriate forum content that you may still have available in any form.

Although in this situation our backup and restore systems have functioned smoothly as built, the event has highlighted an unacceptable designed-in vulnerability that we will be addressing, to ensure to the best of our abilities than something similar does not happen again.

We're all living through the worst US and world economy in generations. Last month we saw our worst loss of service in 15 years online, due to the DDoS attack on PetitionOnline. Last night we saw our worst loss of data, setting back these forums nearly a full week. Thank you so much for all your contuning support and participation during these extremely "interesting times" — as our network continues to share architecture, design, and building plus grassroots democracy like never before, with literally millions of people every month.

ArchitectureWeek, Archiplanet, and GreatBuildings are unaffected and these sites have been fully available. Internal forensic work on external causes of the breakdown in the DesignCommunity forums, if any, is currently underway. Please let us know if you have urgent questions.

Also note that the DDoS attack on our PetitionOnline site, which started at the time of the Iran elections, still continues three weeks later. Intense traffic filtering by NTT/Vertio Network Operations has been successful in keeping the site accessible since the initial five days of attack.