I think people are also misunderstanding the situation in a number of ways.  One, we absolutely had to e-mail our customers about this issue for the reasons I have already stated.  Two, we have a number of different service levels that require different levels of attention.  We developed a scan and patch tool immediately because our Atomic SLA customers get features like this as part of their subscription.  So we basically reported the issue to the Core the day after we patched our our customers.  The real problem here is that because we had so many clients effected it was bound to get to the forums and cause some hysteria.  Honestly, this was not anticipated but probably should have been.  In the future we will approach things a little differently based on what's been said in this thread.  The real issue is that non-customers feel like we have done the community a disservice by not contacting the core team first.  When we realized the severity of the issue we secured our stuff first and within 24 hours reported to the core.  I do not believe this is very far off form what other companies would do except our issue just happened to become very public. 

We have recieved overwhelmingly positive feedback from both hosting and Atomic SLA customers on this issue.  I hope everyone can understand the position we are in, and look at the facts and see that we didn't withhold all this information for days in a plan to hurt the community.  We tout ourselves as being the best, which means we have to constantly be going abve and beyond for our customers.  Our business customers demand high end heavily support services, these are all things we have to take into account when faced with issues like this.

John,

  Do you have a timeframe on the missing forum posts?  I am not aware of any deleted postings (which are sent to moderators) but it is possible that a moderator is being overly cautious to make sure that exploit data is kept out of the public forums.