The site is going down again.
Now, breathe.
This is planned downtime and it's for the better. Our host recently merged with another company and, along with this, they are changing our server configuration. We were on a VPS with 1GB of RAM and a meager 20GB of drive space. We are moving to a dedicated server with 4GB of RAM and dual 500GB drives! More everything! This should allow us to remain stable and hopefully lessen the database connection issues we have been experiencing.
This all goes down Saturday night at 10PM Central US time (3AM GMT). We will be placing the entire site in a maintenance mode. We did it Saturday night in case there were problems so we could have Sunday to fix it, again, if needed.
If you need your fix right away, please go ahead and bookmark this page to get to the IRC room.
See you when we're back!
Well, here we are, back up again. After over a week of downtime, we feel that we are ready to give this another shot as well as explain what had happened.
Last month, we were informed that our server was hosting a PayPal scam site. Our host was working with us to close up the exploit. It seems that whoever got in may have used more than an exploit. I found a couple of new domains on the server that were not set up by us. After further investigation, it was thought that they had the root password to the server. This fear was confirmed when the site went down.
Our initial check led us to the fact that our database tables had been dropped. That's bad.
This effectively removed our forum and game databases. We have been working to try to restore the forum from the information that was left on the server, but after all of the effort, we were stuck. Eddie was able to get the game database back from early December. This also included the blogs. The forum, however, was not so lucky.
The initial forum restoration that we found was from 2009. This included the member table. I happened to attempt to make a backup back in January, but it only partially backed up. Fortunately, this was successful in including the member list and even PMs. So, while we have now lost a ton of the forum, that can be recreated. The important part is that we were able to recover a fairly recent backup of the game DB and almost all of our members (not sure how many registered in the few weeks since my backup).
Now what happens? This experience has certainly left an impression on me as well as Dave, Eddie, and Mike. We will be implementing means to do (starting off) biweekly backups and as we get things honed in, we hope to get this down to possibly daily. We will also be working to have a system in place to test these backups and make sure they are good to prevent this sort of downtime in the future as well as making it easier for us to move hosts in the future should we need to do so.
We are very sorry that this has happened and that it was down for so long. We hope that it hasn't tarnished our image for you and that you continue to come back. Personally, I appreciate everyone that came in to the IRC room during the down time to keep the conversation going and your words of encouragement really meant a lot. The community has always been fantastic here and now that we're back up, I hope we continue to get stronger as a result. Thank you for your patience with me and my stubbornness to try everything I could to try to get it back to where it was before the disaster struck.
Welcome back to Channel 3!
December 31, 2007, 4:57:30 PM, Eastern. That is the date and time that will go down as the date we hit 100000 posts in our forum - our community. From 0 posts on June 8, 2004 to 100000 posts today, certainly, today is a day of celebration. Check out the stats bar as captured for this momentous occasion:
Certainly, I am humbled by the mark, and by the success of our forum. I am humbled by the community that we have. Without our community, there is no way that we could have hit this mark. We are nothing without you guys. Thank you all for fostering our community, and we hope that our community remains vibrant for years to come.
I'd like to specifically congratulate the person who made the 100000th post, Bad Enough Dude. I can confidently say that Bad Enough Dude is the oldest member (with respect to join date) on the site that is not or has not been on staff and still actively posts. That's really cool. He even joined before me, at 4AM on the date that the site launched. How cool is that? Check out the post that made 100000:
Congrats, and congrats to everyone! May the forum continue to be a success and a place for interesting musings and thoughts!
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