Ecosystem Un-FOOBARed

Ok folks, the Ecosystem should be back to normal. Quite a passle of problems.
For those who care, there were not one, not two, but three separate issues that turned out to be causing the difficulties we’ve seen over the past few weeks.
1) A database corruption occurred to the massive ‘links’ table. This happens periodically, as I’ve mentioned in the past, and I haven’t found a way to prevent it. The fix is to simply drop and recreate the table. That’s what caused the actual database errors you might have seen on your details pages. (This was fixed a week or so ago).
2) I goofed and when I separated out “blog directories” (see the lower-right side of the Ecosystem display) introduced a code bug that has prevented new weblogs added to the Ecosystem since then from evolving past Microbe status. My bad; fixed now.
3) To top it all off, somebody deliberately tried to hack the Ecosystem to put a passle of not-very-amusingly named replacement blogs at the top of the listings. Ironically, the combination of the above problems prevented this hack from ever being seen by the Ecosystem-viewing public. And now, the bogus entries have been deleted. So, to my unknown assailant: ha-HA!
There’s a new scan running right now that will finish in a few hours, so you might see an anomoly or two (particularly if you are comparing your history stats to your current rank) between now and 2pmish PST. Other than that, all should be well.
That’s about it. Please check your stats, if you care, and let me know if you see any further problems…
-NZB
PS – I also spent some time this morning de-spamming many comments, and updating my version of Allen’s fine fine MT Blacklist plugin to get auto-updates from the master blacklist. Hopefully that will cut down on the spamminess around here…