Hello everyone.
Prepare for a wall of text, but I figure it's best to explain all that happened...lol
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As some of you might be aware, we suffered a minor catastrophic failure a week ago caused by human error (I won't name who, but it wasn't me...lol). The basic gist is that all users who hadn't logged in in over a year were deleted from the user database, including Serif, the site owner and several other critical user accounts.
What we thought would take several days and a call to Serif and possibly our website host, fortunately didn't take quite as long, but was quite the interesting feat.
I was able to piece together various parts from various databases to restore the users that got wiped. For a while, this caused all new users since February of this year to be wiped, so with more database Frankensteining, I was able to splice together more database segments to restore those users. The next day it was brought to my attention that, since some of the splices were from February, many users were having problems with their account information being outdated, and quite possibly, some users weren't able to log in, as their passwords would be the ones they had back in February. Round 3 of database alchemy later, everything user account related should be restored. Boy, what an interesting few days...lol
All that's left now is restoring their posts. So, for the time being, some posts may show the username, but have "guest" underneath them, and not show any avatar/signature/user info, etc. SMF, instead of deleting one's posts when an account is deleted, removes the user info instead to maintain thread continuity.
So far, I've been able to restore all of the roughly 21,000 user accounts that got wiped, and roughly 60,000 of their posts over the past few days. Anyone (with the exception of a few that the database is still giving me trouble with) that had 10+ posts have had theirs restored so far. The rest will take some time, as I have to go through each user individually who lost them, and reattribute their posts.
All in all, most users won't notice anything's changed, and I suppose that's a good thing.
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The next thing I want to mention is that we're aware of some minor quirks with the files section. Previously, any upload created with a screenshot added caused a HTTP 500 error, and didn't go through. This is caused by a missing PHP feature from our webhost, and unfortunately it has to be added on the host end. Only Serif has that kind of access, so we'll have to wait patiently on that. I was able to modify the site's coding to bypass the coding that called for the feature, but as a drawback, you must have an exact-sized image, or else it will be cropped (cut off) when viewing it.
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The final specific thing that I can remember so far is that to avoid the need for major rollbacks and database dissecting, I would like to be able to make daily backups of the site's database to make sure that if something major like this happens again, we'd lose at most 1 day's worth of stuff. Unfortunately, at the moment the webhost does not appear to be configured for allowing an outside database connection, making an automatic backup of that nature impossible. This will also require Serif's intervention, so stay tuned...
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Aside from that, there's a lot of other minor odd glitches that we are aware of, but unfortunately don't have the access to address at this time. If granted the access, by all means I'll pick away at them.
Again, I figured I'd at the very least bring everyone up to speed as to what's been going on behind the scenes, so to speak. I'm known to be more of a shadow admin, making sure this place doesn't start coming apart at the seams...lol
Erinn Timer
