We're back

[Handruin]

Sorry it took so long. Feel free to rant away. See front page for info on the issue.

 

[Tannin]

Cool!

Great work Doug.

 

[Handruin]

Lunar, I saw your post on the corrupted forum (MBF) before I closed it down...

Sunday...spent the night into early morning ranting and complaining to voxtreme about why the entire forum was corrupted and no communication about this.

Monday morning around 5:45 I continued to read about others having problems. Finally around mid day monday they came forward with their mistake. They claim we won't lose any more data during the transfer. I'll believe it when I see it.

I leave for work into crappy snow. I left at 6:50AM and didn't make it in until 9:00AM. Left work around 6:30PM, and made it home around 7:30. I couldn't get into my driveway because the snow was too high. So I spent an hour cleaning it. Then I began trying to fix the site. The database import took about 5.5 hours (over 2.3 million records on a slow-ass machine). Figure 4+ years worth of posts were just entered in 5.5 hours.

I'm going to bed. My stomach hurts and I'm tired.

 

[Handruin]

Not that it matters for most of you, but while I was waiting for the database to import I fixed some of the front page links. You can now see then old news postings again and submit news.

 

[Mercutio]

Stuff like this is why we get together and send you a PC every so often. Thanks for all the hard work.

 

[sechs]

I can't really complain about a free service, but considering the history here, I'm wondering if there isn't a better deal out there.

Perhaps there's a host out there that checks that the source is the source, and the target is the target?

 

[The JoJo]

Good work Doug! Thanks!

 

[ddrueding]

Great work Doug, it's much appreciated. After seeing the site down for as long as it was, my first thought was "Man, Doug is having a bad day right now".

 

[Bozo]

Thanks for all your hard work Doug!!


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[time]

Typical hosting service these days, I'm afraid.

Doug, I'm distressed that you're working this hard at the start of the week - you'll be cactused tomorrow.

Thanks for all your efforts, above and beyond.

 

[MaxBurn]

Brings to light the hard work that comes from running this place, thanks for doing it.

Which makes me think about the hows and whys for this forum. I don't see any corporate connection or adds to support it, so even if it's a labor of love the hosting has to be paid somehow?

Also I remember somewhere seeing a thread explaining peoples different logons for their multiple personalities, anyone know where that is?

 

[Mercutio]

Dreamhost is pretty nice, for what I use it for (i.e. mostly my private FTP needs). Shell access is slow but I have nothing else to complain about.

Also...
Six different SF members emailed me to find out what was going on while we were down.

Folks, I don't have any special or additional level of access to information about SF.

Just so you all know.

 

[Will Rickards]

Thank you thank you!

Re Snow:
I sort of wish we had snow here, instead a very mild winter with today's high temp about 50F and yesterday was about 60F. I miss the snow. But if I have to shovel more than once a week I start not to like the snow. My son hasn't had a chance to use his sled yet this year or even have a snowball fight with good old dad.

 

[Buck]

Good job Doug, you have a great deal of integrity. If I was your neighbor, I would have been happy to shovel out your driveway so that you could concentrate on our forum.

 

[Handruin]

Which makes me think about the hows and whys for this forum. I don't see any corporate connection or adds to support it, so even if it's a labor of love the hosting has to be paid somehow?

Also I remember somewhere seeing a thread explaining peoples different logons for their multiple personalities, anyone know where that is?

There are no corporate connections or sponsors of any type. I pay for the hosting and some of it is offset by a couple people who pay for resold web hosting accounts. There have also been generous voluntary donations in different forms over the years that help to support the site. For that I offer many thanks.

I think there is a thread that covers the different logons. Search for "sock puppet" in the forum, that should bring up some info.

 

[mubs]

Thanks for all the hard work, Doug. I'm addicted to SF, and really miss it on the very rare ocassion that I can't get to it. My best friends are all here.

This incident brought home to me just how reliable SF has always been, and the behind-the-scenes effort you put in to make it happen. You're a swell guy. Thanks.

 

[Handruin]

I appriciate the comments, but it honestly wasn't as much hard work as I may have made it sound like. The hardest part was waiting for answers. It also bothers me that we lose posts, even if minimal. Down the road if our site warrants a dedicated server, I'll be able to do multiple backups per day.

I really need to come up with a better way to inform you guys of the outages. Would you prefer a simple opt-in mailing list system? This way it will let you guys decide if you want to be notified.

 

[P5-133XL]

The simplest way that I can think of is to physically seperate the front page from the forums (different hosts), so that you need only to post on the front page about any outages in the forums an you can post in the forums any outages in the front page.

 

[Pradeep]

Thanks for the hard work Doug. Sounds like it's time for a snowblower

 

[paugie]

Late, as usual.

But may I add my thanks.