Mod+ WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FORUM

Alex

Administrator
Devau all over again :) Finally, called in the big guns. Our own forum member Bucky is a total pro when it comes to this stuff. He's helped us get back on track and is going to help monitor things going forward. We did lose a couple of threads in the process (that stings.), but given the grief of the last week, and where we were 2 days ago, I'm feel like a guy looking at a glass have full.

On a positive side, I have some pretty amazing interviews to share with y'all... lots in the hopper :)

BTW I have no evidence of anything malicious... just a lotta different changes that caused us to reach and exceed capacity in different ways. Then a port to a new host and a switch to a VPS and then some other strangeness... and then a failure to back up. Not sure that we're out of the woods, but definitely have a better handle on the situation.
 
Alex works hard on both the forums and the podcasts. I think if anyone thinks they have written posts that merit the Pullitzer Prize, then they should go into any of the web caches available and archive that writing for themselves.
 
It's exhausting to have all the stuff you posted and long conversations you've had just disappear.. They don't have to "merit a Pulitzer," no need to be an asshole about it. And It's happened before. The only thing I can get out of this is that Alex and a lot of people do not really want a genuine debate, they want an echo chamber. I'm done here.

I'm not trying to be an jerk. I'm just trying to shine some perspective on the whole thing. It's just not that important. And it's something that Alex does for free. Read through the tens of thousands of posts on the Skeptiko forum version one at mind-energy. Everything being said here has been said about a thousand times before. If you really think you've written something worth saving, then you should back it up. Just because some conversations are erased doesn't erase the merit of having had the conversation in the first place.
 
What about "Agree", "Well-Researched", "Spiritual", "Best" ratings? Will they be back? For now, only "Like" rating seems to work.
 
Everything I've ever posted here has vanished.

Alex works hard on both the forums and the podcasts. I think if anyone thinks they have written posts that merit the Pullitzer Prize, then they should go into any of the web caches available and archive that writing for themselves.

I always save my big posts as a MS Word documents. I put a lot of my creativity (and time) into many of my posts, so I keep them in an offline safety.
 
I should not have used a facetious tone. My point was that the lost posts are likely in the google or internet archive caches. If there is something someone really wants to save, it is likely out there. I guess I was also trying to find a way to express the idea of the value of letting things go without seeming preachy. So they are lost. Not the end of the world.
 
Just wanted to chime in to say that there are still problems being investigated.
I'd like to reassure everybody that backups are being done almost on an hourly basis, so in case of interruptions the chances of loosing entire threads and dozens of posts is unlikely.

Hopefully things will be resolved in a definitive way during the week.

Positive intentions are welcome... maybe machines can benefit as well :)
 
Thanks to Bucky and Alex for the hard work.

I think it's pretty silly for people to claim the skeptical side of the debate was purposefully erased. As Chuck said you can go anywhere to find the skeptical talking points. A far greater loss IMO was the variety of philosophical/empirical/anecdotal stuff relating to the possibility of immaterialism.
 
I should not have used a facetious tone. My point was that the lost posts are likely in the google or internet archive caches. If there is something someone really wants to save, it is likely out there. I guess I was also trying to find a way to express the idea of the value of letting things go without seeming preachy. So they are lost. Not the end of the world.
The problem is that you can't retrieve a sequence of posts belonging to various people. The best you can do is recover your own posts, or post other people's comments under your own name - not really ideal.

On the other hand, I am getting cautiously optimistic that Bucky's hard work has already improved the situation a lot, and he is still beavering away!

David
 
Yes, I've noticed the forum appears to becoming faster and more responsive. I don't think that is subjective. Well done for getting involved and helping sort things out Bucky. As for the Xenforo ratings add-on... don't bring it back please... just keep the site fast, responsive and reliable.
 
What about "Agree", "Well-Researched", "Spiritual", "Best" ratings? Will they be back? For now, only "Like" rating seems to work.

I think they were a good "tool" to give a quick non-comment-response to a post someone made. I hardly think it was that add-on that made the forum crash, since it is not really a demanding add-on. So, I would like to see it returned.
 
I think they were a good "tool" to give a quick non-comment-response to a post someone made. I hardly think it was that add-on that made the forum crash, since it is not really a demanding add-on. So, I would like to see it returned.

AVForums 15th Jan 2014:

Luke the post ratings addon is killing our server

It's adding 13 subqueries to the main thread query. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Please can you optimise this? ASAP?
(We checked that it's not our editorial element, and it's not. The query took 18 seconds to run without it).

----
Luke:

Set 'Minimum ratings for thread list top rating' to 0 if you want to avoid that query

I'd also recommend checking that you have enough RAM allocated to the innodb buffer pool, because there's no way the query could be that slow unless the index isn't being held in memory
 
I think they were a good "tool" to give a quick non-comment-response to a post someone made. I hardly think it was that add-on that made the forum crash, since it is not really a demanding add-on. So, I would like to see it returned.
I think they encouraged even more vagueness than usual. If you care enough to agree/disagree than make a post stating why/what you agree or disagree with. That helps foster better discussion. It's an astounding level of laziness to want to not to have to key a few sentences. I'd like to see the [Like] be shelved too.
 
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