Monday, July 14, 2008

What to do when your web site disappears?

Where oh where has our web site gone,
Where oh where can it be?
With its' info so good and its' links so fine,
I hope that it returns pretty soon! Or I'll whine...

The Chula Vista Genealogical Society web site has disappeared from the http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ domain - without any direction from our society (at least to our knowledge). It was at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cacvgs2/

We think it disappeared last Tuesday, July 8, but are not sure. We tried to find a phone number for Ancestry to inquire, but they hide phone numbers pretty well! I used the email Help Center to Ancestry this afternoon.

We checked the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/ to see what is available in the archives - and there is not much - see http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.rootsweb.com/~cacvgs2/. They have the main pages, but not many of the uploaded newsletter and article files, the surname and ahnentafel database, and the photo collection.

Does any reader at Ancestry know if there has been a server problem at Ancestry? Does anyone have a contact at Ancestry that they can pass to me via email at rjseaver@cox.net? Thank you for any advice or help!

2 comments:

Joan said...

Google has it listed as a suspicious site. It says, in part, "Of the 1 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 1 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 07/04/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 07/04/2008." There's info about contacting Google. See this link:

http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?client=Firefox&hl=en-US&site=http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cacvgs2/

-- Joan

Chris said...

Yeah, it looks like the site was hacked. The cached copy at Yahoo! (last modified 08-Jun-2008) shows some dubious code toward the top of the page.

In the cached copy at MSN (last modified 01-Jul-2008), some different code (also malicious) appears in the same spot.

I'm guessing that the folks at Ancestry.com are aware of the security flaw, and that they've taken down the affected websites until it's fixed.