Forum Loss of Data - May and June

Michael · Last edited by Michael on Thu Jul 21, 2011 4:52 pm; edited 2 times in total

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
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How do you know what kind of pictures they are if you're such a lay-dee?

WarnerPlum · Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2011 4:04 am Post subject:

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

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"Caveat emptor, Plum: let the buyer beware."
"No, Boddy... YOU beware."
~ Blackmail!

Michael · Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2011 5:21 am Post subject:

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.
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How do you know what kind of pictures they are if you're such a lay-dee?

Michael · Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2011 5:23 am Post subject:

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.
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How do you know what kind of pictures they are if you're such a lay-dee?

Michael · Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2011 4:51 pm Post subject:

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?
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How do you know what kind of pictures they are if you're such a lay-dee?

Zoo977 · Detective Joined: 08 Jan 2011 Posts: 986

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

cacums · Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2011 5:55 pm Post subject:

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.
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Not All Stories End in Happily Ever After...

Michael · Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2011 6:00 pm Post subject:

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?
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How do you know what kind of pictures they are if you're such a lay-dee?

Michael · Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 5:27 am Post subject:

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.
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How do you know what kind of pictures they are if you're such a lay-dee?

WarnerPlum · Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 5:53 am Post subject:

Does that mean we'll get our posts back...?
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"Caveat emptor, Plum: let the buyer beware."
"No, Boddy... YOU beware."
~ Blackmail!

Michael · Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 5:56 am Post subject:

We're still waiting to hear back from the forum host if anything can be done.
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How do you know what kind of pictures they are if you're such a lay-dee?

Jane Poirot · Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 12:48 pm Post subject:

It also deleted any PMs made from late April onwards, but I suppose nothing can really be done about that.
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Anyone who thinks Canadians are meek and mild-mannered has obviously never seen us during Question Period!

cacums · Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2011 2:04 pm Post subject:

Yeah I noticed that too.. Ah well.
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Not All Stories End in Happily Ever After...