Penectomy and Transgender forums gone

[HumanFly]

Why have the penectomy and transgender forums disappeared? One disappeared yesterday and the other went this morning.

[Paolo]

Something has gone wrong in the database.

I'm trying to find out what.

[Valery_V (imported)]

It looks like there really was some kind of glitch.

For example, the number of my posts (Total Posts) has been reset to zero. I remember exactly that there were much more than a hundred of them.

[kristoff]

I have been looking but am unable to come up with a reason. My post account dropped from 7500 to 3400. I am looking, but unfortunately, the one who may have answers is in the hospital with serious issues.

[WheelyFixed]

Mine has dropped to about 155... I never paid that much attention to the number, but for better or worse I thought I'd posted more than that....

WheelyFixed

[Paolo]

There has been some kind of glitch, but I don't have the clearance to do a "forums rebuild" of VBulletin, which would likely take all night to do and require the boards to be offline.

The other bad news is our "tech guru"

is in the hospital with serious issues

and won't be back anytime soon!

[Wolf-Pup (imported)]

There are backups of the whole thing I hope?

[Paolo]

Yes, there are backups. To restore from a backup though, and trying to NOT have data loss, is going to have wait until our Guru is out of hospital.

Medically speaking, restoring a backup isn't a simple broken finger set. It's more like brain surgery.

[fhunter]

To add insult to the injury - our chat server is down due to disk failure.... I am working on a fix (yea, remotely. over ~2000km distance).

PS. Sorry a bit of off-topic.

[WheelyFixed]

Possibly tin-foil undie time (seems more appropriate than hats... ) but are we sure that this is just mechanical / software glitch problems, and not the result of any sort of cracking efforts????

Color me paranoid, but it seems like we might be considered a prime target for some of the anti-trans types wanting to "save the world from us perverts...." by direct action....

WheelyCurious

[Losethem (imported)]

Possibly tin-foil undie time (seems more appropriate than hats... ) but are we sure that this is just mechanical / software glitch problems, and not the result of any sort of cracking efforts????

Color me paranoid, but it seems like we might be considered a prime target for some of the anti-trans types wanting to "save the world from us perverts...." by direct action....

WheelyCurious

I'd take the tin foil hat off. If it was someone who was wanting to do it on purpose, I doubt they would have simply settled for a forum or two.

[Paolo]

When it rains, it pours!

I don't believe it was a hack.

If it was a hack, then more than the lower tier of forums on the list and post counts would have been erased.

Why hack in, and not just delete everything?

[Wolf-Pup (imported)]

I would think it is hardware going bad. Maybe a hard drive offline? Are there log files maybe?

Is the site running local to the tech person and remotely to everyone else?

Guess it really isn't possible for us to try and troubleshoot systems we know nothing about. Heck I don't know if the underlying platform is Linux or Windows.

But a lost hard drive would seem to make the most sense to me with no other information beyond what has been posted here.

[markle_wil (imported)]

Fhunter, thanks for off topic post (re chat) . appreciated!

[fhunter]

Possibly tin-foil undie time (seems more appropriate than hats... ) but are we sure that this is just mechanical / software glitch problems, and not the result of any sort of cracking efforts????

Color me paranoid, but it seems like we might be considered a prime target for some of the anti-trans types wanting to "save the world from us perverts...." by direct action....

WheelyCurious

I am not sure about the forum, but chat server had either drunken idiots going in there (solved by IP ban for a week), or password guessing attempts on remote control interface of the server. The later was solved by automatic temporary IP blocks.

What I was able to diagnose on my server looks exactly like mechanical/software glitch in the drive. May be due drive's age

PS. Chat server physically was located... well, out of reach of typical anti-trans group (unless you count Russian government as one).

[WheelyFixed]

I will refrain from commenting on the Russian gov't, except to say that my opinion is that we are not going to see an end to all the mess in Ukraine and so forth as long as Putin remains in office... Given that he seems to have rigged the peaceful routes of power change not to be usable, presumably this means leaving in a casket...

WheelyFixed

[Losethem (imported)]

Wheely,

Let's please refrain about talking about politics of any kind in here. US Domestic, or foreign to the US. We've got folks from all over the world here, and if there is something to say, I'd ask for it to be done in a PM please.

Thanks.

[Valery_V (imported)]

It looks like there really was some kind of glitch.

For example, the number of my posts (Total Posts) has been reset to zero. I remember exactly that there were much more than a hundred of them.

As it turned out, the number of messages (Total Posts) unexpectedly decreased for many forum users.

Not everyone had this number of messages reset to zero, both in my case (from 1134 to 0) and in LT (from more than 3800 to 0); for some, this number has decreased significantly.

Only now I got scared, thinking that the program algorithm could take away the PM opportunity from me .

[Valery_V (imported)]

By the way, if I had the status "Archive Regular", now I am again "I Am Shy" .

[Valery_V (imported)]

Dear server! I just have to make an extra post to bring my post count up to five!

[Valery_V (imported)]

In my opinion the server works like a clock!

After the fifth post I already became a "Newly Active Member" .

[Paolo]

Your old posts are still there. If you go to someone's profile and click "find latest posts," you'll be given the last 500 posts the user made.

[skwerl (imported)]

I miss the Penectomy thread. :: sigh ::

[WheelyFixed]

I miss the Penectomy thread. :: sigh ::

I miss all the missing areas, but appreciate the efforts that go into keeping the forums running in general...

Just out of curiosity is there any update on potential for restoring the stuff that's gone missing?

WheelyFixed