Forum Rollback, vote points, and other issues

[Henhouse]

Hi all,

2 days ago we experienced an issue with our web server that affected all the databases contained there. Our most recent backups of the forums were from the switch in October, and our vote points were from some time in 2015. This sudden loss of data was completely unexpected, and I was not prepared for it. It is somewhat my fault for not having an automatic backup system in place that would have prevented these kinds of issues from arising. I suppose after 8.7 years I have become complacent in feeling that I need to solve issues that have never happened before... Either way, I apologize.

I will be adding 200 voting points to everyone to try and compensate. Though, you need to at least have logged into the website at least once in order to receive your points. So if your account was made in the 2nd half of 2015, or 2016, you wouldn't receive them. So if you see this, and that is you, please login! I'll credit the points later today. (See post below, everyone has them now)


Due to this, our development database of the massive mall update lost tremendous data, which is extremely concerning. We were actually 1 day away from prepping for release, and we've now lost over a month's worth of work. Luckily much of our work is easy to replicate since decisions had been made, and code that was written. We'll try our best to get this update out as quick as we can still, despite this large setback.

Once again, I apologize, and will try to make sure these issues are more recoverable in the future, should they ever arise again.

[Henhouse]

Update:

Many of you who lost your vote points did not receive the 200 compensated ones I gave out 2 days after this incident. I have retroactively restored 200 points to every single account that was not given them, so you should see those in your account now. I wasn't ignoring your emails about this, I just received a lot and was going to work on a solution!


As some of you may already tell from this post, Oldsalt and I recreated the month's worth of data we lost in about 2 days to get the update out on schedule -- we hope you're enjoying it!. :)

PS: We do have a system in place now ensuring the databases are backed up daily at 3 different separated locations to ensure this does not happen again. Woo!