The Great Encryption

The Great Encryption, also known as the November 2011 Crash, was a disaster that occurred on November 29, 2011. The cause remains unknown and resulted in the corruption of every post in the Mafiascum database. Other damaged data included various fields on the topic & user tables, most notably the removal of all user avatars. All but 249 posts were recovered from a snapshot that was taken just three hours prior to the crash occurring, with the posts that were not recovered having been created between the times of backup and the crash.

The main distinction of the November 2011 Crash that it is remembered for was that the body of all posts were mysteriously replaced with 32 character MD5 hexidecimal digests. The board remained functional during the short recovery, which was completed in under 24 hours.

As a reaction to the errors on the forum style, Deltawave unveiled the Tiger forum skin before its due date, and thus the user base dubbed the crash a Tiger attack. Many of the removed avatars were replaced by tiger themed avatars to mark the event.

Among memorable userbase reactions was a spoof on the Bonfire Night rhyme (dramatized by zoraster on Youtube).