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and so do i but that is not the issue here it is about the people not the organization
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If you're new to NRG specifically, their journal and research programs have a solid reputation that's largely separate from whatever forum politics happened on MSW.
NRG and MSW are or were one in the same
NRG and MSW are or were one in the same
Well said, CLB. In fact, I was one of those who got banned from MSW, so I understand how easy it is for old frustrations to resurface... but I fully agree that this isn’t the moment for that. What we’ve lost as a community is far bigger than any individual grievance.
Rather than revisiting past conflicts, I think we should focus on what we can do going forward. As an established and knowledgeable group, we’re in a good position to help preserve, rebuild, and share what we can, whether that’s knowledge, plans, techniques, or simply supporting each other. If we keep the focus on that, something positive can still come out of this.
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At its heart, the “now is the time for all good men” quote is a manifesto for proactive citizenship and moral courage. It contains three critical components: urgency (“now is the time”), identity (“all good men”), and action (“to come to the aid of their party”). The word “party” can be interpreted broadly—not just as a political faction, but as one’s community, nation, principle, or even the greater good. The quote argues that goodness is not passive; it is defined by the willingness to act when action is most needed. It challenges individuals to move beyond private virtue to public service, especially during crises or pivotal moments. In every era, the essence of this message finds relevance, reminding us that procrastination in the face of injustice or need is a failure of character. The true meaning of the “now is the time for all good men” quote is that history is shaped not by those who merely witness events, but by those who step forward to shape them at the decisive hour.
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I have suffered a very significant loss through the MSW outage – my entire La Créole build log going back to 2013 has disappeared.
At the same time, I want to say that I was always treated fairly at MSW. I am genuinely sorry that some members here had negative experiences or were even banned.
Since 2021 I have also been active at SOS, and I have always felt welcome and well integrated in both communities. Both forums have contributed greatly to my development as a model builder, and the exchange in each place has been valuable to me.
In light of what has happened, I believe this is not the moment to look back or reopen old issues. As others have said, what we have lost as a community is far greater than any individual grievance .
Let us stand together, support a fresh start, and improve whatever may not have worked perfectly in the past. Only by working together can we recover as much as possible from this loss.
At the same time, I want to say that I was always treated fairly at MSW. I am genuinely sorry that some members here had negative experiences or were even banned.
Since 2021 I have also been active at SOS, and I have always felt welcome and well integrated in both communities. Both forums have contributed greatly to my development as a model builder, and the exchange in each place has been valuable to me.
In light of what has happened, I believe this is not the moment to look back or reopen old issues. As others have said, what we have lost as a community is far greater than any individual grievance .
Let us stand together, support a fresh start, and improve whatever may not have worked perfectly in the past. Only by working together can we recover as much as possible from this loss.
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A lot of English text for a simple Dutchy….
And for me as a newbie, are we safe on SOS?
Do we have a regular backup?
And for me as a newbie, are we safe on SOS?
Do we have a regular backup?
Yes we are safe
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Great! What a relief
But we are going to take extra measures soon
THe same thing could happen on SOS, so yes, always backup your data.
ran an AI search asking whether the below statement published by MSW and The Nautical Research Guild was true:
In the last three days, there has been a global issue regarding the software that operates computer servers. This has impacted websites and servers around the world. An unscrupulous group of hackers had found a way around server security and had broken into many servers, destroying data.
Outages are tracked by a number of outage tracking services worldwide because information about "global issues" regarding server hacking is critical information for platform administrators everywhere. When any significant security breaches occur, they are immediately reported and likely become big news. This would certainly have triggered an AI response confirming some sort of "global" hacking event. Instead, I received the following response:
Recent Global Server Software Issue — What’s Happening
There is no confirmed report of a global server software security breach in the last three days that has been widely documented by major outage tracking sources. While there have been widespread internet outages in recent weeks, these have been attributed to network infrastructure failures, transit provider issues, and internal service problems, not to a coordinated hack that bypassed server security Network World+1.
Bottom line: The recent global server-related issues have been network and service outages, not a confirmed hack. If you are seeing widespread website failures, it’s more likely due to infrastructure or configuration problems than a coordinated security breach. For the most accurate, real-time updates, check live outage maps from ThousandEyes or Cloudflare Radar.
- Cloudflare Outage (Nov 18, 2025): A major outage affected many websites and platforms, including X, ChatGPT, Amazon, Spotify, Zoom, Uber, and Azure. Cloudflare blamed it on a spike in unusual traffic that caused a configuration file to grow beyond expected size, triggering a crash in its traffic management system. They stressed there was no evidence of malicious activity Ars Technica.
- Hurricane Electric & Cogent Outages (Jan 2–31, 2026): These were network transit provider outages affecting multiple regions. For example, Hurricane Electric’s Los Angeles nodes went down for about an hour, impacting downstream partners in the U.S., Asia, and Europe Network World.
- Ongoing Outage Tracking: Platforms like ThousandEyes and Entireweb Status show real-time maps of global internet health, but no recent “server security breach” event has been flagged as the cause of these disruptions ThousandEyes+1.
- Outages ≠ Security Breach: Many large-scale outages are due to technical failures, configuration errors, or transit provider issues, not hacker exploits.
- No Evidence of Hack: In the Cloudflare case, the company explicitly stated there was no evidence of malicious activity Ars Technica.
- Security Breaches Are Different: If a server security breach had occurred, it would typically be reported by security firms, ISPs, or cloud providers, and would involve specific indicators like unauthorized access or data exfiltration.
Hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPanel, used by millions of websites | TechCrunch
Web hosts are scrambling to fix the bug under active attack by hackers. One company said hackers have been abusing the bug for months.
techcrunch.com
Well said, Jimsky! It is all about the MSW members. But I strongly believe, whether I have a dog in the fight or not, that it is decidedly not in SoS's best interests to "provide aid and comfort to the enemy" by giving any assistance or support to the MSW administration or its tax-exempt 501.c.3. corporate sponsor, the NRG. They have behaved badly time and time again. Not the many great modelers who participate as members. I'm talking about the corporate management that controls that platform. Our assistance should be provided to the MSW member modelers, not to the MSW "corporate oligarchs." These people are not SoS's friends.
Industry security watchdog reports do not confirm NRG and MSW management's explanation of their being the victim of a hacking cyberattack. Industry security monitoring resources report to the contrary that nothing of the "global attack" nature MSW and NRG claim has been reported in the applicable timeframe. There may be some explanation, but as far as I am concerned, it does not appear that they are being honest about the matter for reasons unknown. Neither is there any question of the MSW management's long-standing animus against SoS and SoS members on account of their simply being SoS members. The management of NRG and MSW, after a previous "fatal crash" again failed to securely back up their database. I fail to see in their official announcements the slightest acceptance of responsibility for the loss of the huge amount of highly valuable data that has been wiped out by their grossly negligent failure to follow what is indisputably standard operating procedure for any serious platform. Neither have they acknowledged their responsibility to their members who, at the management's initiation, contributed a tremendous amount of time and energy to contribute the data they did. These people aren't even the friends of their own forum's members.
SoS owes nothing to MSW. There is nothing of any value to the scale ship modeling hobby that MSW ever offered the hobby that SoS didn't do more of and do better. Wake up and smell the bacon! There are dozens of active SoS members who were misled to believe SoS was garbage and then were thrown out of MSW because they did not follow the "party line" and kiss the hands of those who now control it. If SoS were to suffer a fatal loss of its database, do you really think MSW would be riding to its rescue? Get real!
This may be MSW's misfortune, if not its own misadventure, and it's certainly the regrettable loss of a lot of valuable ship modeling data, albeit nothing that is lost to posterity, but the bulk of it in one way or another is duplicated and presently available on SoS. This is an opportunity for SoS to take the lead and leave MSW in its dust. This is the favor SoS should be doing for the scale ship modeling community right now, rather than enabling "bad actors" to continue their misbehavior on a renewed and revitalized MSW.
Now is the time for SoS to reach out to every MSW member and welcome them to join the rest of us at SoS for as long as they wish. I'm betting those "50,000" members will turn out to be less than 500 members who have posted in the last month, but I think if they get to know us, they won't be leaving very soon. The way we help the MSW modelers is to invite them to "stay at our house" for the duration and thereafter, but we don't encourage the MSW management to return expecting to be welcomed back to the ship modeling community. Now that MSW is down, it behooves the ship modeling community and SoS in particular, to see that it stays down and out. Talk about being nice and all that as much as you want but never forget that nice guys finish last.
It's less than helpful to get all maudlin over an imagined "wealth of information we just lost as a community." About all that is regrettable about the demise of MSW's database is that a lot of effort by a lot of ship modelers to share good information has been wasted by forum managers who were incompetent at best, perhaps grossly negligent at middling, and maybe even intentionally malicious at worst, but it's also information that is readily available here on SoS and elsewhere. It's not like the there was a huge fire in the Louvre and the Mona Lisa is gone.
I doubt anybody is carrying a grudge or reopening old wounds about MSW. Neither NRG nor MSW are worth the energy to get one's panties very tightly in a knot. It's not about getting mad. It's just about getting even. As the man said, "It's not personal. It's just business." It's not like anybody who's been wronged by MSW's managers lies awake nights fretting over it. It's just one of those opportunities life sometimes gives us to remind the world that what goes around, comes around. Just understand that there's a lot of people who have a history with MSW and don't have a lot of bandwidth available for virtue-signaling Pollyannas at the moment.
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Bob, I can’t say I’m surprised by your post, but I don’t have any desire to get into a back-and-forth argument about it.
Look, I hear you — and yes, most of us know the history. Nobody's pretending it doesn't exist. But there's something worth separating out here: helping fellow modelers who just lost years of their work is not the same as giving a thumbs up to how their forum was run. Those are two completely different things, and I think it's worth keeping that distinction in mind.
And let's be honest with ourselves for a second — something like this could have happened to SoS just as easily. That's not a comfortable thought, but it's a real one. Whatever happened between our communities in the past, this really isn't the time to drag it back out. The people who lost their build logs, their photos, their years of contributions; they're not the administration. They're just modelers, same as us. They deserve a bit of human decency right now, not a front-row seat to old grudges being aired out, IMHO.
Let's be the humans....this is what is actually required... no less, no more.
Hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPanel, used by millions of websites | TechCrunch
Web hosts are scrambling to fix the bug under active attack by hackers. One company said hackers have been abusing the bug for months.
Interesting information. The article was published on April 30, 2026, a year ago. This vulnerability was identified as early as February 2026, fourteen months ago, and a repair patch was circulated to address the vulnerability. As the article reports, most vulnerable servers were patched by the end of April of last year. The question remains: If this is the vulnerability that was exploited to destroy the MSW database, why don't they admit that the hackers' success was due to their failure to install a patch on their vulnerable servers, and to explain why their two additional back-up files "failed" as well.
Neither here nor there to me. Just sayin'.
Correction: My bad! Thanks to mberg for letting me know that it's still 2026 and giving me hope for another year of life! Time flies when you're having fun and when you're getting old!
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The current year is 2026, not 2027.... unless I've taken a lot longer to lay the Muscongus bay garboard strake than I thought. (BTW, that's the exact date that the MSW site went down)
As for your question that remains; I don't think you understand that websites pay a hosting company to host their site. The host is the custodian of the data and software, and subsequent patches. The host is the one that failed in this instance. As for the backups, that is easily explained as well. The second drive was still digitally linked to the primary drive so it could be backed up or restored easily. This was a preventative measure to avoid drive failures (which is what happened in 2013). As Jim mentioned, the same thing could've happened to SOS...
Bob, realistically, none of us is in any position, nor do we want to be, to pick apart what happened on their end. We don't have access to their systems, we don't know how their backups were set up, and we certainly can't say with any confidence what vulnerability was or wasn't in play. That's just the reality, and BTW, not our business. Speculating about it here won't change what happened, and it's unlikely to help anyone move forward either. The thread is rather informational.
If you genuinely want answers, the people to ask are the MSW or NRG admins directly — they're the only ones who actually know what went on behind the scenes."
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While there are certainly many excellent and unique build logs here, there also were many at MSW that are now gone. Including many of the sorts of research-intensive, unique scratch-builds that you've elsewhere claimed to champion. I'm not looking to argue which site is better or whatever, but it's indisputable that this is a loss for the broader ship modeling community.
I have to say, it's a heck of a look to follow up "nobody is carrying a grudge" with "it's about getting even" a couple sentences later. As someone who relatively recently joined SOS and has now lost quite a few posts, and finds the prospects of re-uploading old build logs pretty daunting, I am glad to see that many members here are being welcoming.
I have to say, it's a heck of a look to follow up "nobody is carrying a grudge" with "it's about getting even" a couple sentences later. As someone who relatively recently joined SOS and has now lost quite a few posts, and finds the prospects of re-uploading old build logs pretty daunting, I am glad to see that many members here are being welcoming.
Is it 2027 already? Time really does fly....
I can't understand them going after a hobby like this.