Regular visitors of the official site's BBS (forums) may notice some downtime today. The reason is that the boards have been "hacked" and were being spammed by an automated robot friday night. Maxis is cleaning up the boards and has thus decided to take the BBS offline until the boards have been cleaned up. When it's brought back, Maxis requests not to post anything off-topic to make it easier to keep the forums spam-free. The Sims 1 BBS is still available, though messages about the downtime of the Sims 2 boards should not be posted there. Maxis has no estimate for when the boards will be back online. Read on for the message the web team sent out as private message to all members of the Sims 2 site.
[Update 11 April 12:47] The BBS is now back up again. Maxis will keep an eye on them to ensure they remain clean and useful.
"The Sims 2 BBS was hacked on Friday night. We've taken the BBS down until we can fix the problem. A robot was written to spam our boards. At this time, if you click on any bbs links, you may see our "The BBS Is Temporarily Unavailable" message or you may get a blank screen.[Update 11 April 12:47] The BBS is now back up again. Maxis will keep an eye on them to ensure they remain clean and useful.
"When we bring the bbs back up, please do not post anything that is off topic. Those threads are making it harder for us to clean things up. Also, please do not post off-topic threads about this on The Sims 1 boards. As of right now, we do not have an estimated up time for the bbs.
"We try very hard to keep our boards clean and useful. We obviously do not support this behavior and all accounts involved with this hack will be permanently banned.
"We thank you for your help and cooperation and thank you for your patience during this downtime."
-Maxis Web Team
Written at 00:45 on Monday, 10 April 2006 by ChEeTaH.
