It’s a common place thing online & periodically I see reference to it.

Last Sunday morning I made my morning stop at the ACDSee forums. Upon logging in, I saw the words – "you’ve been hacked". Joy …. not the way a Community Manager wants to start the day, week, or whatever!

One of my forum moderators from Germany was interacting with the hacker. My forum moderators are amazing people & I keep telling them that! 

The end of the story is that one person created a lot of unnecessary work. The good news is that we didn’t lose any content. We’re presently running a beta in addition to our regular customer interaction. Our community is 17,000 strong & there was a minimum interruption of their services.

The experience made me realize a number of things. Weekend contact information is important to have. Communication needed to be made immediately, then during the recovery & finally on the impact to IT, my manager & eventually to the executive level.

Do you have a contingency plan in place for unexpected events?  . I know that in the digiscrapping community a site went down & they used Facebook to disseminate information.