I have been wanting to do a post since AH crashed a few days ago to let you all know what happened. My first priority was to get AH back up and running with everything intact as soon as possible. It took me, along with six others, literally working day and night from three different continents to bring AH back to life after being viciously hacked. I have strong reason to believe that we were hacked by an organization paid by an anti hunting group to take us down. I will tell you that for the better part of a day I thought that all of the contents of the forum as well as the integrity of the site had been lost and that was a very sick feeling!!!
I have mentioned in the past that AH has a strong security and back up system and that I have now upgraded the site to the highest level available by adding a fully managed robust Terabyte backup solution that provides continuous data protection and off-site disaster recovery for Dedicated Servers. AH will also as of next week be increasing its' primary hard drive to a Terabyte including a faster SSD drive, which will mean better loading speeds for you since the site has been growing so quickly. This has all been very costly so tell your friends in the hunting industry that we need sponsors to help support the site!
Aside from this hacking job, anti hunters have been assaulting us on every level from endless "fake" spam posts (which are just an irritant and a waste of time for me and BRICKBURN) for kitchen supplies and other nonsense to behind the scenes stuff where they engage automated queries to overwhelm and compromise the good operation and speed of the site.
I have not shared with you guys what has been going on as I have always thought that bringing that negative energy to AH would not be good. But after what I/AH has just been through, I thought you guys should know. There are several extreme anti-hunting groups that have put a target on our backs but I for one will not be intimidated. I have received at least 70 hate emails including ones with death threats to myself and my family since November. However this is nothing new to me, I have been getting 3-4 emails like these every month for several years, what is new is the intensity and number.
This increase directly coincides with a few posts that were made on Facebook in the beginning of November by a couple of anti hunting groups, which stole photos from my outfitting website posted them on their pages and made false claims about my outfit. These Facebook groups are not just doing this to me and AH, they are using hunting photos stolen from all over the web to spread false information and to stimulate support and donations.
As soon as I became aware of these posts and photos that were being used without my permission I asked Facebook to remove them, which they did. I thought they had been permanently removed until I received an email from Facebook which quite literally blew my mind saying that they had reinstated the photos and discussion as a matter of "public importance". I am still fighting with them to have these photos removed and have sent them a cease and desist letter, we'll see where that goes.
Anyway, I have been considering starting a thread with the hate mail that I receive and allowing any of you to post your anti hunter experiences or hate mail, etc. Do you think there would be anything positive to gain by doing this or would it just bring negativity? I must admit that some of them are quite entertaining if just for the sheer ignorance displayed by some of the people. Let me know what you think?
