Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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We Will Rebuild - 8 NOV 2013

I am so sorry.

Let me start from the beginning.

Last night, we had a driver error. Something I'm no stranger to. It seemed standard procedure, and as I was about to head to bed to sleep for my regular 9-5 job, I wanted to make it fast. The problem was, this wasn't some ancillary error. This was a specific table in our MySQL database - a database that holds the life of this board. If you think excel spreadsheets are neat, if you like numbers, you should see a MySQL database.

The table within the database, "Posts", was erroring out and would not respond to PhPMyAdmin's scripted "auto-repair" button. This always fixes things. This is my noob gun. This is what I do. It seemed standard, but for some reason, wouldn't work.

Well, the whole site was down, so I did further research. The table "posts" was corrupted, and wasn't responding - kept telling me it was unable to connect. Weird. So I researched more. Site's down, it's very late and getting later, and I don't like it being down while I'm at work. So what is going on? Why won't this thing respond?

Well, I read some articles, and got brave. I wanted to end it. Made my backup. Win. Everyone loves backups, and they should always be made.

Didn't think twice about it.

Pressed "Empty Table".

Obliterated the corrupted file.

Attempted to restore file.

"File is corrupted."

"............"

"File is corrupted."

"......................"

Then began my sojourn. Now we are here. Now you're staring at the wasteland that was. A wasteland created because the hosting company had stopped creating automatic backups because of a technicality I was unaware of and had blissfully been ignorant to their refusal to continue to back up a website so large. A wasteland created because I had lazily decided that the safety net that was no longer there was enough to justify me not caring about performing my own backups. A wasteland created because I had ignored my responsibilities these last few months.

Yeah. This was no foreign attack, we weren't hacked, this was all me, and words can't express how sorry I am to you, the member.

Thankfully, my team of Staff members has figured out a way to try and salvage the situation, and will probably be instructing a lot of you on how to do the same. But as for those who haven't heard anything about this yet, we've lost all data in posts back until August 17, 2013. Yes, this includes the entirety of the Dark Harvest event, something that was pretty near and dear to my heart.

I expect continued errors. I expect a lot of unique, individual problems. I expect a lot of complaints, hate mail, etc. I would stick around to try and make up for it, but I am so exhausted from all of this. The Meet the Member voice conference from tonight is post-poned until a later date.

Lastly, I leave you with this: this has been an awakening for me as web administrator, and I'll fight to further ensure the security of this place. Our safety nets will be put back in place. This forum's walls will be put back up. Redundancies, etc. I know you all have ideas, post them, sure. Send me suggestions on Skype, go for it. But in a time like this, please do not take my silence as disrespectful. There's just too much to focus on, and though I'll probably be reading your messages, I just cant' devote time to all of them.

I'm going to start rebuilding what we lost. I hope you'll help me.
 
To all the Staff Members: Please do not begin deleting topics that have been obliterated by this travesty.

People may wish to individually restore their role-plays through caches.
 
Everybody makes mistakes, Tef. Nobody's got the right to be mad at you for this one - they'd have probably done the same thing. More to the point, you created this place. If people get mad at you, it's because they care about it, and THAT is the important part. Plus, you were trying to fix an issue and were being diligent about it: that's what we want from our staff team.

Honestly, anyone who has a problem with that can shove it. You're doing a damn good job. And we're still here, so...
 
As many of you are no doubt aware, a large number of threads seem to exist, but are empty shells of what they were. You might want to fall to despair, thinking that all that work is lost.

Fear not, for we have many weapons in our arsenal to begin repairs.

To start, you'll want to navigate to a link of your choosing. In this case, I'll use a post in the Roleplay Discussion called Where My Characters Will Be. If you follow that link, you'll see that there are replies, but appears to have no actual content. To this, I simply add the following to the beginning of the link



http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:


Now you should see most, if not all, of the posts that were made.

This is your salvation and the tool that we will be using to rebuild and recover lost threads.

Myself and many of the other Staff members are already well-versed in gathering post data in this manner. It will be time consuming, and it will be very slow. But we will save what we can. In a short while, I will make a thread where we can coordinate these efforts. I ask the community for their patience and understanding as we move forward.

Any questions regarding the restoration process can be directed at me.
 

Mima Jeth

Force Sensitive
Stuff happens, @[member="Tefraxis"]. I'm new here and therefore lost absolutely everything, but it's like LEGO's. When some one else breaks your castle, you build it better the second time. I'm just as responsible for backing up my own stuff, so I could just as easily blame myself. At least I wrote my latest story post in MS Word. I can continue what I started.
 
Yes, please, don't delete. Storing information/idea/planning threads of the WoD faction just to be safe until all this is sorted out, already found one that required me to use cache.

And Tef, stop looking here, go sleep. Seriously. Nobody here is on an witch admin hunt, mostly just glad the board is actually usable again. Plus, we all learn from my own mistakes... not kidding, I've managed to mess up so many computers and laptops but it was the best way to learn. I mean, not advisable but it happens. As long as we can rebuild, it's all good.

Again, no deleting, please <3
 

Gregor Gideon

Guest
G
This was all an elaborate ruse to establish the very first ever board-wide team-building exercise!

Let the rebuilding commence. :)
 
You did your best, and this is certainly not your fault Tef.

I am willing to offer my knowledge as a Information and Computer Security major to help in any way I can. Admittedly its a mostly server protection skillset, but the basics might be helpful.
 

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