Oops

Given that a lot of my readers happen to work in tech, I probably don’t need to explain too much about the PHP vulnerability that has caused so much drama the last couple of days. I wouldn’t do it right anyway, I don’t understand the literal details of it well myself beyond the fact that it was really, really important that I update all my websites. Which I did!

I run four sites right now, but for a very long time it was only one: the comic site, which I built using Comicpress in Wordpress in 2013. For the first few years I’d have to rebuild it every couple of months because literally any update would completely break all of my formatting, or break some outdated plugin I was using to get menu buttons to do what I want. Wordpress (or my hosting provider, sometimes both of them) was also starting to integrate features I didn’t appreciate and didn’t ask for. So, I locked them out of automatically touching my site in any capacity, which was a thing you could still do back then, and the comic site did not update any of its already very shaky infrastructure for. A While.

You see where this is going.

Yesterday, Kiddcommander Dot Com was running PHP version 7.4. The jump forward to a patched version was so catastrophic I couldn’t even log in to my administrator panels. To keep the site in a state where I could get in to consider fixing it I had to disable absolutely every function it had. The comicpress theme, all of it. It does exist behind the maintenance page that’s there now, but it looks like a bomb went off.

Some good news is that the comic pages themselves seem to have survived and are still navigable in order! My author profile got deleted but the notes are still there, and all nine thousand of our comments are still sitting under their respective pages. I don’t think anything has actually been lost! The work now is just going back in and cleaning up the cosmetics and seeing if I can get all my little functions back up and running. After building newer websites in the the tools available to me, I’m not sure it’s even possible for me to rebuild it modeled after old webcomic sites the way it was. Everything about the wordpress infrastructure now is actively trying to prevent me doing things like setting up odd buttons or cast pages with easter eggs in because everything prioritizes mobile devices. Part of why I never set up a mobile version of the site, despite how ugly it looked on phones, was that I’ve always found it much easier to read comic with a page-by-page layout by pinching and zooming, rather than trying to squint at an inline image or having to click through to another image and drag it around for nearly a thousand pages. Wordpress now has no way to turn off a reactive mobile site, so newer websites essentially need to be designed for phones and touchscreens while looking passable on a desktop. The other issue is I can’t truly keep their fingers out of my work, so if I do anything interesting with my site’s layout it’ll get broken every time Wordpress updates (just like the forum does) and I’ll have to keep rolling that boulder up the hill forever. Guys I already have so many boulders. Sisyphus is happy but he also needs to pick and choose which boulders he spends his time with or he will eventually get crushed the next time somebody figures out how to impersonate his boulders and run executable code with them. I fully intend to get the site back up when I can! I need to figure out what I actually want to do here, but for now everything is safe as far as I’m aware, it’s just ugly and taking a nap.

An obvious idea is to build my sites in a different environment but I’m going to level with you, it’s a miracle that any of my websites run to begin with, and it’s already going to take some time for me to get around to working on this. Especially since my stamina for this kind of thing has been reduced so much! I do not have the ability to prioritize the amount of effort it would take to learn new tools so I can eventually rebuild the website hosting the webcomic I just had to step back from because of my health. Believe me, the people around me who are more knowledgeable about this stuff are very clear that my lack of interest in properly learning website design and administration is a frustrating quality, but I’m already stretched quite thin across several different disciplines. This is what we got.

For now, since the official archive is unavailable indefinitely, the comic pdfs are pay what you want until something changes. If things carry on this way longer than I’d like I’ll collect the uncollected pages and temporarily list them too. If you already own them, you have my blessing to pass them around as you see fit if you think someone would enjoy reading them.

Thank you very much for your patience!
-Aria