Greetings All,

I have a website I built using a Joomla 3.x RocketTheme template with K2. www.rionpaige.com

Tuesday it was spammed with 500,000 comments which apparently shut the site down and now only displays the error in the title: Error displaying the error page: Application Instantiation Error

The Admin is also inaccessible.

After finding out it had something to do with the DB I stumbled upon the massive comments, did some research and found an easy method to remove the 500k comments from the DB. I completed that and the DB is now clean but the site is still down and I don't know where to go from here. I also searched all the other K2 tables and did see anything suspicious.

This is all basically above my pay grade. I've read where enabling the CAPTHA will stop this from happening again, but can't get to the site to do so yet.

After laying out the site it was immediately handed off to some marketing group to manage (Rion Paige was an X-Factor contestant). Well, they have no back-ups of the site and neither does godaddy. So any options there are off the table. They just called me in a panic and I'm trying to help…

Any ideas where to go from here?

Thanks! Erik

Hi. Which Joomla! version are you using? If you are using Joomla! 3.3.1 then keep in mind that the minimum required PHP version is 5.3.10. How do you removed the comments? Are you sure you didn't remove any database tables? I suggest to edit the file configuration.php and set :Without a backup it will be very hard ( not to say impossible ) to get the site back as it was.

Greetings, It was a few months ago that I installed the site for them and I can't remember what version of 3 is installed.

I am confident the people who are "managing" the site have not done an update from the original install, and it has been running fine for months. So I assume that the version and the php version matched up.

I removed the comments using the steps outlined here:
http:/[url=http:///www.seogon.com/blog/bulk-delete-all-comments-in-joomla-k2]www.seogon.com/blog/bulk-delete-all-comments-in-joomla-k2[/url]

I will look into the edit code you provided thanks!

SOLVED -

Removing 500,000 K2 comments, brought the site back.

Updated and changed proper settings to Joomla and K2.