...more recent posts
Sorry about the logs being down for so long. The problem is very time consuming to fix because there are 1,125,435 rows in the table and it's been corrupted at various places, so I can't do a select all on it. I fixed the comment table (which had the same corruption) by going through it by hand and pulling out the corrupt entries, but that table only had tens of thousands of rows. So that was a pain, but at least possible. With over a million rows I just can't do it by hand. I'm trying to write a program, but it's proven difficult because of the corruption.
Anyway, that's my excuse. For the present I have just started the log over again. I should have done this before. I still have the old data, and I'm still trying to fix it, but at least you can see your log again now - it's just that it starts from a few minutes ago, so you'll only see data going forward.
The site was down for a while this afternoon (2 - 3 hours.) I think the other drive failed. This makes some sense since it was probably from the same batch as the one that failed recently. These things have a life span. Still trying to access damage.
We had some fairly major issues yesterday, but it looks like not too much damage. At some point during the day our primary drive failed. Seems like this took a little while (it was exhibiting strange symptoms leading up to the crash.) Once this was detected the drive was pulled and replaced with a backup, thus some things posted yesterday disappeared (from between when the backup was made and the drives switched.) Additionally, the entire site was down from around 11:30pm for the next few hours. I'd appreciate any reports of missing posts/comments. Especially if anyone notices anything missing that was not posted yesterday. Sorry for the hassle.
Having some trouble with comments. Working on it...
Site went down for a few minutes just now. Not sure why. Investigating. No real damage is apparent.
We're having some issue with false new comment notices. My guess is that this is related to spam removal. Tom, did you remove a spam recently from Photo of the hexagonal "atmospheric" structure on Saturn and Showing new media work in the gallery threads? Just trying to get to the bottom of this. Sorry.
Page owners now have a tool to help them delete huge spam runs. Go to /spamdelete and follow the instructions there. It's basically like a 'find and delete' script, so the key to it being effective is to pick out a word or phrase you can search all your comments on that will return *just* the spam comments. In practice this isn't very hard because the spams will often contain a weird URL that is similar over all of them (like 289jwa89423w232.spamhost.com) or it will use the bbcode '[url]' link code that we don't use on this site.
Please let me know if you have any trouble using it.
Page owners can now close comments on selected posts. To do so, go to the comment page in question and click the [close comments] link found after the repeat of the initial post. If a comment thread is closed it will still display any previous comments, but it won't show the comment textarea box. To turn it back on: go to the comment thread and click the [open comments] link now found where the [close comments] link was before.
Some old threads are spam magnets. This should take care of that issue.
I am going to try to make some adjustments to deal with the sluggishness of the site. I think I will purge all user accounts of people who haven't visited in over 4 months (keeping, by hand, a few that I recognize.) Hopefully everyone will agree with my thought that this isn't a big deal. If someone wants there account back they just have to sign in with their old name again.
Here goes...
I started copying this site to the new server. You don't necessarily have to be aware. But if you were going to upload anything (images I guess) and it didn't matter to you whether you did it now or waited, then you should wait. If you do upload something after I crawl through your directory (but before we switch to the new server) we'll just have to figure it out and copy it over in a second step. So maybe comment here if you do upload stuff this weekend (I don't mean posts, just images.) Not sure yet but maybe I will try to make the switch live for Monday morning.