The other day, disaster struck on my forum for people with depression. The accounts of all active members, including myself, were deleted. Completely wiped out, along with private messages (internal email). I knew something was wrong when I tried to log in and got an error message. When I looked at the front page of the forum and saw it announcing that we had 109 members instead of the 1,600 or so that I knew we had, I realized that something very bad had happened.

On any other online forum, something like this would be an inconvenience, maybe a serious inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless. Not on this forum. It was more than that.

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