In case you haven’t noticed or are one of the many who’s asked on our page, our Facebook page has been hacked. 

On Friday, June 19, 2015, we received notification that a false account had taken over our page. The hackers removed each of the H&R administrators/editors, and started posting offensive, rude content that your trusted resource for all-things-Western-riding would never consider sharing.

It made my blood boil and my stomach sick. 

We’ve spent a lot of time building a community on Facebook. We carefully plan our posts and what we share with you, just like we do in the printed magazine. We respond to comments, answer personal messages, and thoughtfully consider your feedback on each post. We value the relationship that social media has allowed us to build with you outside the pages of the print product. And when someone abuses that relationship the way that these hackers have, we take it personally.

We’ve worked tirelessly since Friday to come up with solutions. We’ve emailed/called/messaged Facebook over and over again. We’ve even had offers of help from our trusted advertisers. (Thanks, SmartPak!) I was fortunate to attend the American Horse Publications seminar over the weekend, where I received so many tips and tricks to try to get our page back, not to mention many sympathetic words of encouragement from my peers. One friend put it best when she said, “It’s going to happen to all of us sooner or later.”

Here’s hoping the H&R staff can serve as a helpful resource to them if they ever find themselves in our boots.

For now, our boots are pounding the trail, so to speak, to find a way to get back our page and return to you the posts you’ve come to expect, value, and share. If you’d like to help, you can join the effort by labeling each post you see from us as spam to let Facebook know that we’ve been hacked. Just click the down arrow in the upper-right corner of the post, choose “report post,” then “it’s spam,” and then “Horse&Rider’s account is hacked.”

We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of our effort to return our page to it’s regular programming. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we’re keeping up our regular posting schedule. 

 Thanks for believing in us and spreading the word that, no, we didn’t post “What Your Tattoo Says About You” or any of the much more offensive posts that have gone up. We have lots of great content to share with you once we’re back in control of our page.