Thanks Nir :)

The "friends list" will take a bit longer to restore, but we have some clarity on what caused the issue: 

1. Last night there was an attack on our servers by an automated Senegal based crawler. The crawler tried to access glocals 20,000 times in 30 seconds. Our system recognized something was wrong and shut down as a safety feature. All signs we have are that no private info was accessed by the crawler. 

2. After the system shut down last night, and as a further safety measure, we re-set all parameters. As part of this re-set, several files - including the one with the friends list - need some realigning. We are working on that now, and once done the friends list will be visible again.

3. As glocals grows, we might be targeted more often by IT attacks. We are beefing up our security for this. Already now our servers pare hosted in CH, by one of the industory's leaders who used the latest hardware and processes. 

Hope to have this concluded ASAP. 

Nir

No Nir, what you actually mean is:

"All glocals members will now show the number of "real" friends".

Hahahahaha!!!!!!

Hey my 52 Glocal friends are gone?

and I just added a new friend from Argentina and its was not added?

Nir, sorry, I didnt finish my post,

If we add a member today , will it be lost?

And if so, would we assume/need to request the friend invite again?

if you can wait with adding new friends until we get this fixed, would be great. The current "friends" feature is being worked on right now, and could still be un-stable and hard to predict. 

good bye glocal friends, no more geneva online friends,

Gotcha

http://youtu.be/K0TH2j0-F7s

Update:

The issue will not be fixed before tomorrow (Monday) earliest, altjough it's our top priority right now. Sorry. 

It's not like if we can't live one more day with 0 friends on Glocals.

Come on.... True friends are always there, no matter what ;-)

Well, it's a good way to do some tidying-up!  :o))

first world problem !!!  But it does suck donkeys gonads never the less.

Poor ol' Ehsaan in ZH.  :o(

and i thought everyone has unfriended me on glocals :(

Thanks Nir ;) at first I was shocked ;) Hope to get back my friends again. Fingers crossed ;)

UPDATE:

The friends list should be back by tomorrow (Tuesday) mid-day. 

Nir

My two cents, so maybe the "so called friends" which have not been online in the past 4 /5 years disapear finally?   = this is what I call a good clean up, LOL.

Swiss:

The system will restore all your friends, then it's up to you to do your own personal spring cleaning...(-;

Update:

Issue now fixed, friends lists are back for all members.

Sorry about this.

Nir

Thank you Nir, I can imagine how frustrating that was.

It looks like that people who have invited somebody during this periode have only the new frinds in the list.

People that did not invite new friends have the old ones back. :-)

Nir, Jumpman is right.  During the "closed" period, someone sent me an invite which was accepted.

He's now my only friend - and I don't even really like him all that much!

Haha!  Seriously - it hasn't worked for everyone. 

Oh No!  Ignore last post - they're all back!! 

Perhaps the list is updated when the user comes online....

other bugs subsist, like friend invites, one i accepted but still remains ?!?!?!?!?!

Same here... I can not accept new friends.

(you can click on accept, BUT nothing changes, they are still on the list, and no new friends,  )

Good luck Nir and everyone else on sorting this out. 

Also, THANK YOU for everything.

Update:

We're doing some more work on the Friends function tonight to ensure the final issues are solved. Should be back to normal tomorrow morning. 

Still have one issue for friend requests received during the black-out.

I waited for the list to come back to accept those request, but now when I accept those, the are added to my friend list, but the requests stays "Pending Requests" list. How to remove those from the pending list once they've been added to my friend list?

Thanks Damien, we're on the case. 

Everytime we think we found all the related issues, we discover a new one...

UPDATE:

OK, we think we now killed every last bug that was still linked to the Friends List issue from last week, incl the one Damien reported. If you run into more, pls let us know. Thanks.

I dont know if this bug I see is related to fixes today, but all messages in my inbox (old and new) have the same (wrong user) associated with them. Thus I can't really know who is sending friend requests and personal messages.

cheers!

Okay - so now I have no "Friends updates" - I still have "friends" (I think!!) but the updates are blank and also the Forum's updates is semi-blank.

I hope you get the hacking-bastards who stuffed up the website for you (and us!) and sue them till the cows come home!

Well, maybe a bit BEFORE "the cows come home" - this being Switzerland and all - it could be a long wait!.

Thanks for all you're doing BTW to fix all these bugs - it's much appreciated by all of us 

Are you planning on going public. This reminds me of the growing pains of services like Twitter... Movescount by Suunto is another example. ;-)

And now the Groups seemed to be stuffed.  Down from 350+ in the "Movies Group" to just 4!!

We faced another issue last night which led to the the Friends List going back to 0 again, and some members not being able to log in. These issues are now solved. 

Carolyn: did the Group members number go up to its original size?

Richard: we wish that was the reason for it...(-; It's less nice and less lucrative than going public, it's just code issues. 

The Group thing seemed to have righted itself as the invite's now gone to over 400 people, instead of 4!  Thanks.