The Forums are Restored.

[Arioch]

As you are probably aware, the forums were down for a few weeks. I'm still not sure what caused the strange database changes that broke the forums, but the antipathy, arrogance and outright incompetence of the webhost (Yahoo Small Business, if you want to know) during attempts to fix the problem finally broke the camel's back (literally -- they completely deleted the site while attempting a snapshot rollback). Well of Souls is now on a new server, the site is back up, and if you're reading this, the forums should be working. However, DNS changes are a fickle thing, so don't panic if you intermittently see the old server rather than the new one over the next few days.

If you see updates on the Outsider index page of July 10 or later, you know you're looking at the new server. If not, and you get a 404 error (or worse) trying to use the forums, you know you're on the old server.

The forums are a newer version, so things will look unfamiliar for a while, and I wasn't able to grab the avatar images off the old server before things went to hell, so you'll have to upload new ones.

Special thanks for jterlecki for his invaluable help in troubleshooting, salvaging, upgrading, and reinstalling the forums.

Thanks for your patience during this super-fun time.

[dragoongfa]

Yay, it's back.

[Murph]

Thank you.

[Krulle]

Thank You!

[SVlad]

The avatar’s filesize must be between 0 and 6 KiB.

Seems to small. My 80x80 png avatar is 12 Kb.

[Zarya]

5.8kb

(and thank you Arioch & co for getting the forum back online)

[Arioch]

I upped the limit to 25K.

[icekatze]

hi hi

Thanks for taking the time and effort to fix things. I've done enough web maintenance to know how frustrating and awful it can be, so it's much appreciated.

[jterlecki]

I have 20 years of experience in this domain and I still don't understand what happened and how badly they (Yahoo) screwed the pooch. I ended up needing to install phpBB3 on my own server and import Arioch's database to fix one of the key tables by hand. Once that was fixed, moved everything to his new hosting location. Was an interesting experience overall. He still will need to do minor tweaks here and there (a lot of the board settings he had simply vanished).

Naturally, this was all done for the glory of Talon and Spiral! May plot armor protect them until the end of the war!

[Arioch]

I do think I know what caused them to botch the snapshot restoration; they had migrated to a new server architecture on July 1 (ironically, the day they did the first successful rollback), and the snapshot was from June 21. Now, if any of them had been competent, a) the system wouldn't have shown snapshots from before the server change as valid, and b) the engineer would have known not to attempt it, but that obviously wasn't the case. They did actually succeed in restoring a July 3 snapshot, but not until the following day.

However, the problem with the forums appeared almost a week before the server change, so I don't see how that could have been responsible for the problems we saw. It also happened at least twice: once on June 23 or 24, and then again on July 1 about an hour after the first successful rollback temporarily fixed the forums.

The phpBB version I was using on the old server was badly out of date, and the database credentials had been compromised, so it's possible that the damage was caused by something external.

[sunphoenix]

'Yes, yes... time for the oral sex...'; er..wait..wrong channel! {Monty Python reference}

But yes.. GREAT to have a voice again! Glad all the previous High quality discussion, Dialogue, Fanfic's and RP was salvageable!

I'm a long time fan and will always return to the forums... OUTSIDER is a major part of my SciFi Heritage!

Thank You for your Efforts over the LONG years Arioch! I hope to be employed again sometimes 'hopefully sooner rather than later', so I can return to being a patron!

[NOMAD]

yes yes I love the new site, loads fast and seems and I like the new look.

any possibilities of outside theme ?

[Arioch]

yes yes I love the new site, loads fast and seems and I like the new look.

any possibilities of outside theme ?

I'll try to make an Outsider-themed skin at some point, but it's not high on my priority list right now.

I'm just glad to have the forums back.

[danuis]

Hurray~!

[Werra]

Is the search function bugged out in the new forum? For example, I'm pretty sure that Arioch has mentioned Stillstorm more than 13 times on here. I might just be imagining it, though.

[Arioch]

Is the search function bugged out in the new forum? For example, I'm pretty sure that Arioch has mentioned Stillstorm more than 13 times on here. I might just be imagining it, though.

I rebuilt the search index, but I wouldn't be surprised it it wasn't working properly... the interface is not exactly what I'd call intuitive. I'll do some tests.

[kiwi]

I’m glad the forums are back, but I’ve noticed a wee issue: clicking the ‘show’ button on a spoiler tag won’t open it. Anyone else having this problem?

I’m using Safari on iOS.

[Krulle]

I’m glad the forums are back, but I’ve noticed a wee issue: clicking the ‘show’ button on a spoiler tag won’t open it. Anyone else having this problem?

I’m using Safari on iOS.

Let's see:

SpoilerShow

This is a test

Yeah, I can't open it either, but I'm currently also on iOS for Safari (IPad somenumber).

[dragoongfa]

Same on firefox.

[sunphoenix]

Show does not work... that means a lot of the RP material is no long visible.. Ah well.