Apologies for Outage

[apollos0fAlexandria]

Sorry to members who experienced a recent outage. The issue was actually very simple, but took a few hours to resolve.

Hopefully everything will be stable now, and special thanks to Marina and others who raised the alarm.

[apollos0fAlexandria]

I realize that there were some additional random corruption problems after the outage. I apologize for the inconvenience. The good news (if I can term it that), is that the corruption resulted from a very mundane technical issue. There was nothing malicious about it and our security is a strong as always.

I carried out a standard database repair and this seems to have solved most issues. That said, there do still seem to be some additional minor issues to address.

If anyone encounters a problem going forward please post it here and I will try to manually fix it.

[Bobcat]

I appreciate your effort and skill in dealing with this Apollos.


Bobcat

[Bobcat]

Hi Apollos,

I tried to post a comment on this thread (about Lazarus). Whether I hit preview or submit the same thing happens. The post disappears and I get this notice:

No route found for "GET /posting.php" (from "posting.php?mode=reply&f=2&t=2401")

Fortunately, after this happened the first time I redid the post and saved it to a text file before I tried it again, but got the same result.

Thanks again for your efforts in dealing with the problems.


Bobcat

[Bobcat]

Just FYI, Apollos has efforts underway to find and fix the problems with the forum software.


Bobcat

[Bobcat]

Just so everyone is aware, Apollos has updated the forum software. Things, so far, seem to be working much better. On the downside, it looks like it is possible that a couple of days worth of posts may have been lost (the last couple of days). At least it looks like that. That may have been one of the necessary 'evils' to updating. I'm not totally sure of that yet. But he may have had to make a copy of the DB at some point.

At any rate, Apollos, I appreciate your hard work keeping things going.


Bobcat

[apollos0fAlexandria]

Hi all,

Once again, sorry for the pain. If there were any long posts made during the transition period this past weekend, it's possible that they fell into an abyss as the internet waited for the new site to propagate. In simple terms we did all we could to preserve data, and it should in theory only be a handful of posts that might not have made it over.

Nevertheless, I do want to acknowledge that this can be painful if members typed directly into the forum and didn't keep a backup. I'd like to remind all users of one of the early guidelines posted here: viewtopic.php?t=414.

Also, I want to reassure that security has remained our top priority since the technical troubles began, and there was never any danger of a breach. It was a storage and database corruption issue - pretty basic stuff - but without any budget for having people monitor the site this is a potential price we pay. I've always resisted putting up any means to donate, but some people have reached out with offers and I appreciate them. It may be that we reconsider this at some point just to cover the basic necessities that might avoid a situation like this. However, I don't think we're currently at that point. I have a very awesome friend who has helped tremendously throughout these recent technical difficulties. Everything he has done has been from the goodness of his heart, and he has not accepted any payment.

Thank you all for bearing with us. Once we are satisfied that everything is 100% stable, we should not experience something like this for a long time, if ever. We've migrated to a new platform and have put a number of additional measures in place to avoid any such outage.

Best to you all,
Apollos