GENIUS FORUMS

After a fair bit of messing around, I managed to restore a backup of the forum, which takes us back to the 2nd of this month. This is the first time we've had this problem, so I think it is unlikely to happen again for a while.

Note: If you are a new member who registered within the last ten days, and now find that you cannot log in, you will need to create a new account.

P.S. Some recent posts can be recovered from google, such as
The irony of love and indifference

This cached page was found using a search like this.

Add extra search terms if you can remember some of the words from the post you want to recover, and don't forget to click on the "cached" link in the google search results.

PPS. I've recovered a good deal of the posts from the last ten days, but I can't remember all of the topic titles.

Thanks Kevin. It doesn't sound very confident though. You recently upgraded to this pre-release version of phpBB so it's possibly some remaining bug in that (it's why it's called pre-release candidate... ). Chances are quite big it will happen again, I'd say. To say that it won't because it's the first time sounds not very logical. I see there's a RC3 version released last week, probably the final candidate.

This is actually a "release candidate", rather than a "pre-release candidate". :-)

Actually, I think we've narrowed-down what the problem was. Dan was in the middle of doing some admin functions when his browser crashed. (His computer seems to be on the blink). I suspect that his browser sent some corrupt data to the database, which somehow messed it up. That shouldn't happen, but it seems too much of a coincidence that the problem happened at the same time.

Some searching of google will show that many people report similar problems when upgrading this phpbb version of losing posts and/or members. There is a lack of solutions though. The browser crashing during whatever shouldn't cause the post tables to be deleted from the database.

WhorlyWhelk wrote:Some searching of google will show that many people report similar problems when upgrading this phpbb version of losing posts and/or members.

Our upgrading seemed to go without a hitch.

I think all the posts remained in the tables, but their indexes got messed up.

And whose saying it's not all cause and effect now I wonder?

BMcGilly07 wrote:And whose saying it's not all cause and effect now I wonder?

One does not have to know what the exact causes per event were to know that it was caused.

Good job, Kevin. Thanks for taking the time to fix the problem.

Yeah, thanks for the effort Kevin. I tried to help by restoring the Zeitgeist movie thread and I added some additional finds in the Toxic Certainty thread (from 9-11 July!!) too using also the site search method, although I didn't use the three month limit but just: site:theabsolute.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php

Google is said to have several indexes and I'm not sure which is accessed with which query type. Might explain me finding a slightly later crawl, or perhaps it's just a matter of searching an hour later....

It seems we've all lost our post counts accrued July 2 -12. I feel younger and lighter!

Thanks for the cue Diebert - I'm finding a few more too.

edit - unfortunately, Google only let me look at 10 pages before it gave me an error message saying my request looked like spyware.

This is the second time this has happened. This type of forum will always be a target, and although it is thought some mistake from an adminstrator has occurred, I'll bet my money on some egotistical freak hacking in and running rampant.

Specifically I 'd target for research the dude that I said made a Borat type comment. He was definately a weirdo of some sort.
I'd also be careful of Wired, judging by his level of arrogance, he is probably part of the same group.

It must have taken a fair bit of work to get everything back, so thanks Kevin and anyone else.

Jamesh wrote:This is the second time this has happened.

Actually, the last time, that I think you are referring to, was when we were with the Ezboard service. Ezboard was hacked and nearly all their forums were lost.

It was then that we started hosting our own phpbb forum, and this is the first time we've had to resort to restoring a backup.

We have been flooded once or twice by spammers, but we seem to have the spamming under control for the moment.