Month: October 2026

An update about yesterday’s downtime

As you might have noticed, viaLibri was offline for ten hours yesterday. In all the time I’ve been working for viaLibri I can’t remember a time when we’ve had to take the website down for that long.

We weren’t alone. As widely reported in the news, a vulnerability had been discovered in PHP, the programming language that powers viaLibri and (according to some estimates) over 70% of websites on the internet. Unusually, details of the flaw were shared widely before a fix had been released. Following the advice of several government agencies we decided to take the site offline until a patched version of PHP became available.

We realise this was a disruptive move for all of you, but the situation left us few alternative options. The vulnerability was so severe that it would have granted any attacker unfettered access to our servers, and the databases connected to them. We felt that protecting your data was more important than keeping the site online, and we hope you understand.

All our servers are now fully patched. We have checked our logs and found no sign of unauthorised access. As far as we can tell, your data is safe.

Got a thousand wants? We’ll import them for you

One of the best features of viaLibri is our saved search service, Libribot. Using this feature you can save sets of search criteria (which we call “wants”). Libribot will then check your wants against our search index several times a day and send you an email if any new matching items have come on sale.

Over 8,000 people use Libribot to make sure they’re the first to know when items they’re interested in hit the market. Most of those users have a small number of wants saved, but we’ve also got a growing number who have a thousand or more active wants.

Managing a wants list this long can get a little tricky, and it’s fair to say that our website’s user interface wasn’t designed with thousands of wants in mind. To make things easier, we’re more than happy to import wants lists for you manually. All you need to do is email us at support@vialibri.net and send us an Excel or CSV file containing the details of your wants. We can also give you a template file to fill in if that makes things easier. As it’s a manual process it’s not an instant import, but we aim to handle them within a couple of working days.

This import is a free service that we offer, and you can use no matter whether you’ve got a free or paid viaLibri account. For free viaLibri accounts Libribot will search one of your wants each day cycling through your wants over time. On a paid account, Libribot will check 100 or more of your wants every day.

So, if you’ve got a long list of items you’re looking for, why not get in touch with us and have Libribot do the work for you?