Greetings, website readers,
Visitors to this site may have noticed a series of lacunae and irregularities recently: The website was wholly disabled for 3 weeks in October, Stacks Explorer disabled for a month, and up to today, the posted calendar was out of date.
All of these situations derived from hassles generated by hackbots that infiltrated WordPress and packed the source code for our site with malware. While we arranged for the WordPress code to be scrubbed the site was offline. On the recommendation of supportive humans, we contracted with Dreamhost to use their code-scrubbing service. Following the success of that procedure, it still took another week or two to reestablish Stacks Explorer in association with the refreshed code. Just last week Stacks Explorer was restored to full service.
It then took until today (the 4th of November) to reestablish all legitimate access privs for we who maintain this site, which is why the November calendar is posted here just today.
Thank you to *everyone* who helped with this situation:
Devin Smith who created Stacks Explorer and helped us even when he didn’t have time to do so.
Andy Cowitt who advised and guided the situation response.
Chris de la Fuente who first alerted us to the *first* hacking episode in August
Spencer Bowen who helped us navigate.
Courtney Fellion who built the first WordPress site and aided with this current situation response.
Thank you!