Okay, so I’m just going to be flat out and open about this. You’ve all noticed the site has been going through some weird stuff lately. Allow me to explain what’s been going on.

Crush! Frag! Destroy! was offline from the wee hours of January 20th until late on the 22nd due to being hacked by some… let’s go with “person or persons badly in need of a hobby”; that’s a far more generous appellation than what immediately comes to mind.

With this hack came 2+ days of fighting to try and figure out why I couldn’t restore the site from the backups I had on hand. After many hassles and headaches, however, we finally got this beast back online, but not without a few hitches.

First, my backups were somewhat old – prior to any of January’s posts having been made, to be specific. This meant that everything we’d done for the month (which, thankfully, wasn’t too much) was gone. Thankfully, through a combination of digging through the hacked database and some writers with the forethought to store offline copies of their work, we have all of the missing posts finally restored, as of late last night.

Secondly, we fell way behind on news in the interim, which left us wondering what the heck we should do. Should we try to scramble to get some badly outdated news up for the sake of keeping the site flowing? Should we just scrap it and pick a week to start fresh from? Decisions, decisions…

Thankfully, the solution presented itself rather simply.

Next month, February 22nd to be specific, is the 1 year anniversary of the launch of CFD! and we were already planning to do some stuff to celebrate this momentous occasion, so we figured why not fold a few more changes into the mix?

So, here’s what you can expect to see during the month of February:

• Rather than waiting for the 22nd to roll around, we’re going to spend the entire month of February celebrating CFD!’s birthday. We plan to do at least one contest, ideas for which are still kicking around. Suggestions, anyone?
• We’re also planning to finally get our Game of the Year and New Year’s Resolutions features posted up. In fact, we’ll probably lead the month off with them.
• The site’s layout is getting redesigned. Along with a new visual gloss will be some features that we’ve wished the site had for quite a while. Also, we plan to have all the bits and pieces (staff pages, etc) that we’ve never quite gotten around to finishing in place.

There are also a few more things planned, but we’ll be covering some of those in our New Year’s Resolution feature, so just hang tight.

So, we may be a bit light on the coverage this week, but it’s only because we’re planning to explode with something bigger and better next week. I hope you think that’s a decent trade-off.

We thank all of you for being patient and sticking with us through annoyances, hardships and good times alike. We also hope you like what’s coming up soon. Thanks again.