WordPress MU

As I write this post , i have just recovered from a trauma for losing my 3 years of hard work in one blink. I registered myself with Wordpress MU site http://www.ibloggie.com 3 years back. I decided to create a blog on "Windows Vista How To Troubleshooting" and General Technical Articles. The blog was hosted as http://grdead.ibloggie.com . The blog got some fame among the Vista users and got mentioned on various sites. below is a list of some :

http://thevistaforums.com/index.php?act=Print&client=printer&f=54&t=27980
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread73818-12.html
http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Windows/Windows_Vista/Q_22952377.html
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-networking-sharing/117206-cannot-browse-internet-new-vista-laptop.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_gMeqrIlg0&feature=related
http://www.vistaheads.com/.../169945-cannot-browse-internet-new-vista-laptop.html

Everything was sunny till 2 days back i discovered that i am no longer able to access the site from any network , be it my office or be at home. I am shattered to see that my site has vanished completely from the internet. out of curiosity I visited few other blogs hosted on Ibloggie and got the same result.

It's a sham that a hosting company , nevertheless free , does not even bother to put a "Contact" link on its site. This is my last effort to escalate the matter through Wordpress as i believe it's the parent site for Ibloggie. I have even reported the issue through Wordpress 3 days back , but no joy ...

If anyone from WORDPRESS is reading this , please , this is a serious matter!!!!. I could be contacted on my email id :
mukherjees123@gmail.com

or my official id : shaon_mukherjee@dell.com

I'm sorry to tell you that in all likelyhood WordPress doesn't have anything to do with ibloggie.com, other than ibloggie.com running on a freely available version of wordpress Mu.

Maybe you should try contacting them through their proxy email addresses at:
http://whois.domaintools.com/ibloggie.com

I'll tell you right off.

The folks at WordPress have no control over what people do with their software, and aren't responsible for some asshat just closing up shop.

Too bad you got burned, but I'd say you probably got your monies worth over 3 years, and then some.

Honestly, I don't think this thread should be here. Guess I'm not the only one as someone has already flagged it.

Guess CS had the same thought. :)

A quick whois shows that the actual parent site is metroleap.com. I would suggest contacting them to see if you can get any help.

I would suggest that if you don't have a backup, try to grab your posts off of google cache.

grdead - hopefully it's only a temporary problem although judging by the version number in the header that site is wide open to be exploited so it may well have been hacked. I hope they had backups.

Unfortunately, there's nothing WordPress can do. Get your posts off Google Cache, or if you subscribed to your own blog you can get your posts in bloglines.com or google reader too.

I hope that things get back to normal on iBloggie. The fact that the home page is still up and has the sub-blogs listed indicates to me that the WPMU installation is probably still intact, they've probably just had a server configuration change which has broken the site.

I'd like to point out, that if you run a WPMU site, please take it seriously as users such as @grdead place an enormous amount of trust in you keeping the site up and running. When I started my site, I wasn't sure how long I was going to keep it up, but now that I have lots of active users posting great content to the site, I feel responsible for keeping the site up as long as possible.

hmm, without actually knowing if this is technical possible, a problem like this, demands a way for the user to be able to export his content!

Either as core feature in WPmu or as a plugin. The problem might be, that most of us here are WPmu hosts - and as long as we can do our db backups, we don't care about the users :-p
(the last was a provoce)

hhberthelsen, users can export their blog as a backup measure. I actually point that out in the TOS, but maybe a plugin which will alert the user that he hadn't performed a backup in X days is in place.

-> mark-k

I've just tested for the Editor and Author profiles in WPmu 1.5.1 and can't find a feature where the user can export or backup his blog. May I ask, how you suggest your users to do backups? (sorry, if there's something I'm misssing)

I think that you have to be a blog admin to do this. the export functionality is located under manage >> export.

I am not sure if it backs up the images and other uploaded files, but hopefully people are smart enough not to store their only copy of an image on the web....

Nope, export only backs up posts, pages, & comments (not sure about links).

And yeah, I would hope that anything they upload is not the only copy.

It's unfortunate for the OP, but another example of why you should back up *everything* you can, independantly of whatever host your own (be it just blog entries to your whole damn server).

-> mark-k

Yup, Admin role will do the trick, thx for the help :-)

And no links are exported it seems: This format, which we call WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.

As a service for the blog owners, it could be interesting to make a shell script, that exports the content and mail it on eg a weekly basis to the blog owners e-mail address. Wonder if you can do a WXR export from a shell script?

Actually I believe the importer will now pick up images. I know that there was some discussion about it. Haven't done an import in ages.

Links:

Exporting links: http://urlofyoursite/wp-links-opml.php

Importing Links

I had wondered if anyone else had noticed the version number of the install.

Readded modlook. This person is going around to many, many sites and spamming this and the links.

Regardless - it's back up now anyway.

tdjcbe - is it the links to ibloggie.com you're worried about? If I was running that site I'd be worried too as it's so hackable.
grdead - get your blog off there as soon as you can. If any of the bloggers on that site are malicious they could delete everything with a small bit of work.

mu 1.o...whoa :-(