IMPORTANT: Information regarding recent downtime

[shriekingviolet]

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, the forum has been down since Saturday evening. No this wasn't planned downtime (I would have told you all about that if it were), we had some unexpected, major problems occur in the database that were either due to Mercury in retrograde or a failing hdd (or both). As a result, there were three major tables that had to be repaired and given their size, that took hours upon hours to run functions on. And then even that wasn't successful so we had to take even more time to restore week old copies of the compromised tables, which means a LOT of data was lost including a weeks worth of posts and affected topics. I greatly apologize for so many posts missing, but there was nothing to be done and at this point, no way to recover them. We are working on getting the database to back itself up much more frequently than weekly so in the future if something like this happens again, the data loss won't be so great. I know that's a great inconvenience for many of you, especially where reviews and swaps are concerned. It couldn't be helped.

 

So far, as far as I know *knocks on wood,* the only lost information is in topics and posts that have been created since Feb 26 and everyone's read/unread markers. Everyone's member accounts, reward points, pms, etc. should be unaffected. There might be a few error messages here and there, though I tried my best to find them. If you do run across one, copy down what it says, and then pm me with it and where it happened. Just give me some extra time to respond. Fixing the forum has been a small nightmare and I need a little rest time. It's amazing I didn't try to hang myself with the power cord sometime in the last 72 hours.

 

Anyway, on to the few tidbits of good news. I had a forum upgrade planned waiting in the wings which I took care of this afternoon as I figured it'd be easier to do it while the forum was down than schedule more downtime. There are a handful of new neat features (like a list of similar topics on the bottom of each topic page, a list of members who've viewed that topic that day, an icon with all members posts that allows you to easily search for all posts that member has made in that topic, among others) for your use.

 

Also we've reopened the forum raffle for the time being. We still don't have a concrete plan as to what will be done with any extra money because I haven't had a chance to discuss this with my accountant (been too busy working to get the forum back up!) about what the IRS is going to think about all this, but quantum spice and I have reassessed our forum budget and decided that as the money is coming in greater quantity than we thought, we might as well set a monetary goal that would cover the cost of all the little wishlist items we've always want for the forum but couldn't afford before (like chat, a good gallery, blog features, moving to a dedicated server early). The ticket sales are set to cap after another 555 tickets are sold, but provided the chat with my accountant goes well that cap will be lifted.

 

I think that's all for now. Welcome back guys!