Forum Loss of Data - May and June

Post by **Michael** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 3:52 am

Sorry to post this in the General section, but since this situation hasn't really happened before, I've been receiving a lot of questions and thought this might be more noticeable than the News and Updates section.

On 7/20, the forum database became corrupt resulting in a situation that wouldn't allow the category fields to connect to the content. For the moment, we've been able to recover the posts up to the end of April and Tum is still working on restoring the rest.

I apologize for the inconvenience and realize how frustrating this must be - especially to those of you in the middle of games. Hopefully we'll be able to get this resolved.

-Michael

WarnerPlum · Post by **WarnerPlum** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 6:04 am

Oh no... no! This is appalling!!

Post by **Michael** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 7:21 am

Well, the good news is that Tum is implementing an automatic backup system going forward so we'll never lose more than a days worth of posts.

He's still working on retrieving the data now through our web host's backup.

None of the forum's content had been lost when this glitch occurred. It was only the forum's mechanism for connecting to it. It's very frustrating.

We'll see what happens.

Post by **Michael** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 7:23 am

I also have the last 300+ posts in my RSS feed. So if we can't get a current backup, I can at least post those to help with those in game situations.

Post by **Michael** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 6:51 pm

Well, it looks like the evil forum gremlin kicked our ***... We've warped back in time at the end of April. But I have all the posts from June 28 on and will be manually uploading those.

This is all my fault for not being more diligent in backing up the forum data. (Since I never delete any threads, the file is always HUGE.) But as I said above, we've learned our lesson and will be backing everything up automatically on a daily basis now.

I'm sorry to those of you who've lost some posts. (I'm really sorry to any new members who joined and have now disappeared!)

If, by chance, anybody uses an RSS feed to read the forums, please let me know if you have any of the content between april 28 and june 28.

Has anybody seen the candlestick?

Zoo977 · Post by **Zoo977** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 7:01 pm

I think we've found the elusive secret to time travel: Losing a bunch of website data.

cacums · Post by **cacums** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 7:55 pm

My only concern is that some people may leave their games to rot since it may take a while to clean them back up. But none-the-less, we all must move on and let bygones be bygones.

Post by **Michael** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 8:00 pm

I should have everything I can resurrect done soon. I'm working on it all tonight. I think the games shouldn't be impacted that much since I'll be posting the last month's worth of material as it was. How often is it necessary to look back through all the posts in the game anyway?

Post by **Michael** » Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:27 am

So... some of you may have noticed that the forums were down again.
The problem Tum discovered is that for some yet unknown reason, another website's forum information was being overwritten onto our forum database code on the end of the forum host. It's complicated and we're still waiting to hear back from the host's team on this. But we seem to have found a solution by creating an entirely new database and transferring yesterday's backed-up file to it.

So... hopefully this is it and we *shouldn't* have this problem again.

WarnerPlum · Post by **WarnerPlum** » Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:53 am

Does that mean we'll get our posts back...?

Post by **Michael** » Sat Jul 23, 2011 7:56 am

We're still waiting to hear back from the forum host if anything can be done.

Jane Poirot · Post by **Jane Poirot** » Sat Jul 23, 2011 2:48 pm

It also deleted any PMs made from late April onwards, but I suppose nothing can really be done about that.

cacums · Post by **cacums** » Sat Jul 23, 2011 4:04 pm

Yeah I noticed that too.. Ah well.