Problem with Review Board

[candlefind]

Hello,

I bought the ReviewPost script a while ago and have been using it on my site for over 6 months. Here is the main page of my review board on my web site:

http://www.candlefind.com/candle-reviews/index.php

For the category called, "Candle Companies G & H," I had several companies in that category and many many reviews written from my visitors. I just noticed that all the companies are wiped out except for one. I didn't do anything in my Admin section to cause this to happen. Can you help me? Do you know why this would have happened??? Is it possible for someone to hack me? I don't even know how they could have done this.

Carolyn

CandleFind.com - The Site for Candle Lovers!
http://www.candlefind.com

[Chuck S]

Hello

There would only be a couple ways for products to disappear like that.

1. An admin deleted them from the system.

2. The user's whom uploaded them deleted them.

3. The admin deleted the user from the install which in turn deletes there reviews and products.

[candlefind]

Hi Chuck,

Thanks for your reply. I'm kinda freakin' out over this. I'm the only admin and did not do #1 you listed. #2 couldn't have happened because I only add products to the board. I'm not really sure what you mean by #3. Can you please explain? "The admin deleted the user from the install" deleted them from the install? huh? I don't think I did that.

Is there any way to recover the lost reviews? I don't understand this. All I do is approve reviews...I never mess around deleting anything. This just happened out of no where. So there is no chance I could be hacked?

Now that this has happened, I feel like I should make a backup of my board...I never have before. It confuses me on how to do this. I feel like I'm going to mess something up. I read the instructions in my admin on creating a backup, but don't feel confident on making sure some of the stuff is set right....

"You should set your gallery to CLOSED in your config-inc.php file while doing a backup."

How do I do this?



Anothe thing I'm confused on about backing up...

It also says, "Backup uses the mysqldump command, so make sure that the path to this command is set properly below (this is set in the config file). large databases may timeout if you do them all at once and you may need to backup tables individually. MySQL 4.x requires that the database user that your gallery is using has LOCK TABLES permissions."

I don't know how to make sure the path to the command is set properly and I also don't know about the whole lock tables thing...my server has MySQL version 4.1.14-standard. Can you please help me?

Also....what can I do to "protect" my review board on my server?

Thanks,
Carolyn

[Chuck S]

Carolyn

If someone hacked you I would think there would be more than deleted products. Number 3 is if you delete a user from your board in Admin => Edit Users you will delete all there reviews and products. The script asks for confirmation. You say only you add companies to the install yet I registered a username and am able to upload a company. I would tend to think one of the 3 scenerio's would explain this. There would be no way to get them back unless you repost them. That or restore a database backup prior to when they disappeared.

Backing up the usual path to mysqldump is usr/bin/mysqldump. You may need to contact your host for the explicit path if thats not it. You also need to have a backup path set on the server and a directory set to 777 to accept the backup sql files. I find phpmyadmin much easier to export a database backup personally.