Friday, January 7, 2011

For the record

In mid November 2010 many horse records disappeared and/or got messed up from one of our database tables. Our initial investigation was centered around the possibility of our website being compromised. After investigations, we couldn't find any evidence of this and found an error in the sql server coding made during a coding update that caused this problem. We had initially spoken to Amaretto and told them that we believe we could have been hacked as we could not see anything in our coding that could have caused this. As it turned out, we were never hacked, it was a coding error as said above. Due to miscommunication this didn't get conveyed back to Amaretto.

What had been written in the official response in the Amaretto breedables blog (titled Offical response to AmarettoCheats) by Jason Cooperstone was correct, as far as he knew.

There is no deception or lies here and the issue should not be construed this way. We released a news article under our Site News on the 15th of November explaining this problem. The horse data, over time was updated and fixed, and the only loss was to notes, and allocations that our customers had made to put horses up for sale, or for stud, which was easily fixed by the customers putting those horses back up for sale or stud.  A free month was given to each current member's account at that time, for the inconvenience this caused.

We do not store, or ever ask for email address. Our passwords are encrypted and totally locked down and were not compromised.

mySLhorses is a third party application, it is not run by Amaretto, and they have no access to the inner workings of the website, it is run on a separate server. As has already been stated on the Amaretto blog, we also provide a tool for the Amaretto staff, to help them handle their support tickets.

Calista Janus has been working with Amaretto, helping out with support tickets for only a few weeks. Calista & I have worked hard and long hours to provide a pedigree system to suit all, but we are not perfect, mistakes happen. The drama, nasty comments and behaviour of some people in IM's, notecards and messages in group chat is sad to see. Calista is over 6 months pregnant RL and doesnt need any stress right now. We hope that this will be the end of this issue, and we wont be discussing it with anyone any further. It is time to move on.

mySLHorses.com Development Team