IMPORTANT NOTICE [for old forum members]

[brian]

A server error on November 6th 2002, between approx. 20:15 - 22:15, *caused a complete and serious collapse of this forum. It began with the extensive deletions of data, some of which was recovered - but the incident still left this entire forum crippled for three days until I could reconfigure all of the board files.

I've lost the entire "200 CD giveaway thread" [amongst others]. I had no back-ups, and my current hosting provider had none. I have no idea who signed for a CD, and who did not.

Frankly, it's left me feeling sick. I'd staked a lot on building a good net reputation, by giving out free stuff. Reputation was utterly important. After all, I'm investing in people wanting to consider buying my novels - when I'm finally published. I still feel sick from it.

There's nothing I can do now about the unrecoverable threads - all of that information is lost. All I am able to do is reopen a new "200 CD giveaway" thread - and this time ensure I have back-ups of the replies.

Ironically, I was looking to back up the entire forum, in preparation for a planned upgrade. Bad timing.

Anyway, that is my explanation. I offer my sincere and unreserved apologies for the entire incident.

Brian

[brian]

The good news is that I opened an account with a new webhost. Before I could move the original forum the entire General section disappeared.

Then I lost admin access.

I tried to transfer what was left of the old forum onto the new webspace, but it was too fragile - board files had become too damaged for the board to work, and uploading nerwer versions would have resulted in loss of board data, effectively rendering it unusable.

I had planned to upgrade the forum to a php based one, rather than Perl - but the disintegration of the original forum has led me to completely recreate the old forum from scratch.

I'm going to spend what time I can this afternoon going through the old member files and rejoining all members one-by-one until the memberlist is rebuilt. Then I'll see about posting threads up to get the place looking much neater.

Anyway...it's already been a long day. Looking forward to finishing everything to get the forum functional for everyone again.

Brian

[brian]

It's been over a month now since I posted this, so will presume that those who really wanted to see it have done so.

The short is - the old forum was destroyed - so I built up a new one.

This forum is being backed up!

In fact, time for this week's save...

(and thread un-stickied!)