Can't Log On and Threads Disappeared

I can only log into my forum on machines that I've already been logged in on. Otherwise, I keep getting stuck on a neverending loop of some adf.ly advertisement. It makes me wait 5 seconds, then says I can "Skip Ad," but every time I click that it sends me back to the login screen, and when I try to log in again, it sends me back to the ad. And there's nothing I can wait out, it's not a video ad, so I'm stuck locked out.

In addition, when I got in on a computer that already had me logged in, I went to one of my forums, and numerous threads were gone, just totally disappeared.

Please HELP!!!

Hi,

Can you give me a URL of your forum please?

Derri wrote:Hi,

Can you give me a URL of your forum please?

msbpen.forumotion.com

Hello,

Please could you post a screenshot of your problem as you've described it nice and clearly but it's best to show us a picture once you showed us a image then we can ask for a test account so we can try and re-create this issue  

How do you take a screenshot?

Click here to find out to take a screenshot

Hi,

Can I get the following information from you. I believe you're caught in our spam system (sometimes happens accidentally)

Please send this via private message to myself.

Code:

Username on Forum:
Email address of your account :
Your IP Address:
Are you the founder? Member or Moderator:

PM sent

Hello,

Once your waiting for a reply from Derri,

In the main time I suggest you try downloading 

AD blocker plus

AngelaHolmes wrote:Hello,

Once your waiting for a reply from Derri,

In the main time I suggest you try downloading 

AD blocker plus

Adblock plus doesn't often blog Adfly pages. At least my version doesn't.

I've received your PM and I'll submit a report about it.

Derri wrote:

AngelaHolmes wrote:Hello,

Once your waiting for a reply from Derri,

In the main time I suggest you try downloading 

AD blocker plus

Adblock plus doesn't often blog Adfly pages. At least my version doesn't.

I've received your PM and I'll submit a report about it.

Hello,

Oh okay  also not to be rude it's 'Block' mistakes do happen we are only humans

I'm unclear on what you mean by "I'll submit a report about it." Does that mean there is a solution or no?

Also, yes, I have ABP already installed on both machines I've been working on.

shack3000 wrote:I'm unclear on what you mean by "I'll submit a report about it." Does that mean there is a solution or no?

Also, yes, I have ABP already installed on both machines I've been working on.

Hello,

Our forum administrator 'Buttercup' is the pro admin and your topic will be marked as 'pro-admin' if she cannot solve the report a statement will be sent to our technicians I'm not sure if their home workers or in the company area which is based in France

shack3000 wrote:I'm unclear on what you mean by "I'll submit a report about it." Does that mean there is a solution or no?

Also, yes, I have ABP already installed on both machines I've been working on.

I've sent you a message explaining everything. I've made a report and our Pro Admin will looking into this. From your description their is definitely a solution to this.

AngelaHolmes wrote:Hello,

Oh okay  also not to be rude it's 'Block' mistakes do happen we are only humans

Hello Angela Holmes,

I kindly ask that you refrain from posting, if you have nothing helpful to contribute to the topic.

Thank you.

What do you mean by missing threads?  Do you mean topics or posts?

SLGray wrote:What do you mean by missing threads?  Do you mean topics or posts?

Sorry to not be clear. Entire topics are missing. This has me horrified, as it includes important student work and correspondence between myself and the students.

SLGray wrote:What do you mean by missing threads?  Do you mean topics or posts?

Hello,

Thread is a topic:

• a group of linked messages posted on an Internet forum that share a common subject or theme.
  
• COMPUTING
  a programming structure or process formed by linking a number of separate elements or subroutines, especially each of the tasks executed concurrently in multithreading.
  

Although despite missing topics, I just realized also that the one topic left in one of the forums has about half the posts missing on the back end. So I suppose the answer is both: entire topics in some cases and posts within topics in other cases.

MAJOR PROBLEM as my students have started emailing me asking, "Is the site down?" and saying they only see one or two topics in forums that should have many more. So now it's happening to pretty much everyone it seems. It may not be an emergency to you folks, but it is to me. This is a year's worth of work that's disappearing! And it's compromising my classes and making it look like I'm starting the year off utilizing some junior varsity technology product. I don't want that to come across the wrong way, as I've loved the product to date, but the product seems to be disintegrating by the minute in front of our eyes. If you can please rescue us it would be tremendously appreciated.

Nothing can be done until tomorrow I'm afraid when our Pro Admin comes on.

Fiddlesticks.

AngelaHolmes wrote:

SLGray wrote:What do you mean by missing threads?  Do you mean topics or posts?

Hello,

Thread is a topic:

• a group of linked messages posted on an Internet forum that share a common subject or theme.
  
• COMPUTING
  a programming structure or process formed by linking a number of separate elements or subroutines, especially each of the tasks executed concurrently in multithreading.
  

I know what a thread is, but I was making sure because some members use the wrong terminology.

Hello

@Shack: I've checked your forum. I suppose your username is Shack and you are the administrator of the forum. Some of your messages are missing. Do you still have the adfly page?
==> For your information, this page appears when your anti-tool tool registers your profiles. It is nothing wrong. I have delisted your profile from the anti-sam tool. However, for missing messages the only solution is to make a full back-up of your forum.
For that, it need your approval

Waiting for your answer

Regards

I am the founder, yes, username Shack.

I haven't used the Founders' Tools before, so I'm not sure how the settings work exactly or what selecting an option in a menu will specifically do. My biggest concern is that I have students who have successfully submitted assignments since what appears would be the last "revert to" date on the full backup menu. Is it impossible to save the posts they've made since then?

Also I'm interested to understand why this happened. The one change this week was that I had classrooms full of students who couldn't register for the forum because the captcha codes absolutely would not work. I watched them type in correct codes, time after time, only to be told they were wrong. I even tried myself to help type in for them over a dozen times with the same result. This lasted over 40 minutes until I gave up, making it a completely wasted class session. So then I came on this forum and was clued in that I could disable that captcha confirmation, which I did. So the only thing I can hypothetically guess is that the system maybe thought my multiple accounts added over the course of a couple days were spam account additions? But this whole thing happened a full day+ after all those major account additions. And if the system is so concerned about spam, which is great in theory, why does it employ a captcha system that is completely unworkable? Any insight would be greatly appreciated, but obviously my top concern is to just get my forum back in order.

Hello

If you make a backup of your forum you will get back your data + get actual information.
For that you have to make 2 backups as it is written on the following tutorial: https://help.forumotion.com/t9692-the-utilities-backup-and-restore

If you don't manage to do it, I can do it for you. Just let me know the date of the backup

I was going to do the Full Backup, but I realized after examining things more closely this morning, that all the things that were missing were my posts, and only my posts.

So in "B Block" forum, it listed 15 topics, but when anyone clicked on the forum, only 2 topics appeared. That's because it's a new class and only 2 of the 15 students had REPLIED to their personal thread (aka topic) I set up for them. The rest of the students hadn't logged in yet to submit a homework assignment, so when all my posts disappeared, so did their threads (because I was the only one who'd posted there yet).

In addition, the reason my second year students' threads had gone from, say, 5 pages to 3 pages was because all my replies were gone from their threads.

So instead of doing a full backup, I just selected user and messages, and that seemed to work. That seemed to by and large return things to normal. My replies to their posts are back in order, and the threads I started for students have reappeared. There are a couple of posts I regularly edit that aren't updated as a result of the revert-date, but if that's the only lingering loss, it's livable. 

I guess the bigger question is: Why did this happen?

I certainly want to avoid it happening again. Like I said before, my suspicion is that it may have been related to some spam red flag perhaps, but it seems illogical to flag the founder of the forum as a spam account. The only reason I disabled the captcha codes for students trying to register was because the captcha codes didn't work and were impossible to pass through, no matter how many times the kids typed them properly. I did manually activate multiple accounts at a time from my Admin panel so the kids could immediately log in to the forum, so perhaps the system viewed that as spam-ish activity, but again, if I'm the forum founder, I don't get why I'd get turned into an un-person on my own forum.

Again, any insight would be wonderful so I can understand how this happened and how to avoid it in the future. I'm going to go through the same sort of process at the beginning of next school year, so I'd like to do whatever is necessary to avoid running into the same problem 12 months from now. Thanks for your help and feedback.

So everyone on the forum is using the same computers (school's computers)?

SLGray wrote:So everyone on the forum is using the same computers (school's computers)?

They were all registering on different computers in the same computer lab. They do their work on home computers. But registration all took place in the same lab, and I approved them manually from my admin panel on the teaching station computer within that same lab.

Hi

I made 2 full backup of your forum . Let me know if all messages came back

Regards