WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR FORUMS?

[BasiliskWrangler]

This is just a quick post to update everyone on exactly what happened to our forums.

Last week, after enduring a particularly horrible day of SPAM registrations, I decided to update the forums with some new Blacklist Modification to help block bogus registrations. The initial install went fine, although we noticed it screwed up some colors on our DarkFantasy style. The new mod did seem to block more spammer bots, so we were initially happy. I looked into the color issues, and decided to disable our custom style until a solution could be found. Then I noticed that there was an update to our Blacklist Mod, and after applying the update, we got a number of errors kicked back to us. The rest is pretty much history: the forum database quickly cascaded down into chaos.

No big deal, because our last backup was only 24 hours old. But trying to restore that backup (and the others we have) proved to be impossible. The backups were incomplete due to phpBB's crappy system (won't go into those details). So there we were, without forums and looking at nearly 7 years of posts down the shitter. Luckily, our web host was able to restore an older database for us and get us to this point.

Thanks for everyone's patience. Check your settings, make sure everything works, and let me know if you see any problems.

We will be updating the forums again, so you may see things go up and down around here, but we will always keep a solid backup on hand from now on.

[SpottedShroom]

Glad you were able to get things back up without losing (much) content. It would have been a shame to lose all the fruitful discussions on here over the years.

[Randomizer]

Luckily this happened during a slow period so you didn't lose anything significant.

[Arkos]

Everything seems to be working well on my end.