Greetings Schmitty’s Toonsters! I finally got the site back up and working after being hacked by a vicious ‘Phantom’ hack! It’s almost as scary as it sounds… the hack targeted some of the vulnerabilities in the WordPress code and it was causing visitors to be redirected to random pharmaceutical websites that obviously had no affiliation with this one.
I ended up restoring everything to a previous version of the site and in so doing added a few security plug-ins… hopefully this will ensure that it does not happen again moving forward. There have been some great benefits to designing with WordPress, but there have been quite a few downsides to it as well.
In the end, I lost some of the content and a few of the most recent posts in this process, but so far, everything seems to be working again! In the comments below, please report if you happen to find any broken features on the website that I still need to address. It is greatly appreciated!
Flash Forward
One of the major changes also made to the site during this whole process was updating the Schmitty’s Toons! Classics section. When I originally set up this section, I was still utilizing the old Flash plugin. Unfortunately, Flash has become largely obsolete in many browsers now and the content had been blocked for many users. It was also unable to be viewed on smart devices. In response to this, I converted all the old ‘Toons! to standard video formats and uploaded them to YouTube.
In doing so, some of the interactive ‘Toons! (like ‘You Don’t Know Duck’) lost their interactivity and make much less sense (even more so than before). They are still there, but please be advised that they are not being viewed as originally intended.
Below, is a ‘marathon’ of the playlist, just for fun. You can see the individual shorts and commentary for each on the Classics page.
Sorry again for the hiatus and I look forward to continuing to add more content in the upcoming weeks!
Schmitty out.