Thank you

Thanks for your patience as we've dealt with the worst security problem in our more than 10 years online. The website went back up about 7 p.m. Thursday, without ads. The ads may not follow for several days, as the security work continues on those.

Here's a note I posted on our Facebook page, which was invaluable during the 24 hours we were down:

Thanks for the comments. In no way have we blamed users for the problem...we apologize for the problems caused and appreciate all your patience while we address the security issue. Regarding Kel's note, we did identify the problem as the Trojan virus known as Live Platinum Security...there's a lot of material online about it. Regarding how quickly we informed users of the virus, we were aware of the popup security warnings last week but couldn't find any confirmed problems until Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, when the site simply had to be taken down to assure security. There'll be extensive post-mortem work on how this all went down, but the top priority throughout was user security.

More to be said and I'll plan a column over the next few days, but again, thank you for your patience and for dealing with the frustration and some expense caused by this viral attack on our site.