[Brian of Nazareth]

only ones gone were a while back now but still a shame bye bye Arbroath and the Villa Journalist one. Just have to do better ones instead :p

[charnley]

look on the bright side... this losing stories thing has made me decide not to start writing again :thup:

[Raptor]

Originally posted by charnley:
look on the bright side... this losing stories thing has made me decide not to start writing again :thup:

Cos there's nothing good left to be up against?

[Kris]

Hi,

I just wanted to apologise for this problem, felt I owed you guys that much at least. It seems somewhere along the line I goofed up with a rather complex sql statement that was supposed to purge the OTF forum of threads (we were at a relatively serious storage issue stage on our forum server). This would normally not have caused an issue as the forum software should maintain integrity but this also seems to have failed, for which Ive berated and complained to the developers.

Not much use to you guys I know, I just want to apologise as I know you guys put a lot of hard work and effort into your stories.

Apologies
Kris

[Kris]

Originally posted by BobBev:
**** poor software if you can't backup/restore forum by forum. Time SI got a better forum provider. My enthusiasm to continue drops another notch downwards.

I totally agree with you and I think even some of the SI top guys are begining to feel the same.

[Kris]

*If* anyone has html cached pages of their stories, then please email them (along with any other supporting files such as graphics etc) to me and Ill spend the time to reconstruct them into our forums.

It might take a few days though as I have a two week old baby daughter to look after so I might have some spare time at 3am

[BobBev]

Originally posted by Kris:
Hi,

I just wanted to apologise for this problem, felt I owed you guys that much at least. It seems somewhere along the line I goofed up with a rather complex sql statement that was supposed to purge the OTF forum of threads (we were at a relatively serious storage issue stage on our forum server). This would normally not have caused an issue as the forum software should maintain integrity but this also seems to have failed, for which Ive berated and complained to the developers.

Not much use to you guys I know, I just want to apologise as I know you guys put a lot of hard work and effort into your stories.

Apologies
Kris

Kris,

I appreciate you taking the time to visit. No hard feelings on my part, just some disappointment that the Board providers seem to have done a poor job. I have all my stories saved as Word docs so it is quite possible for me to re-post but I certainly appreciate your offer. I don't think that anyone affected blames you personally and we can see that you feel bad about it. Do you think the SI guys will/can take any steps to have a more robust recovery process in place? Seems that a forum-specific backup and restore would go a long way to aleviating problems such as this.

[Kris]

Ive decided to approach it from the other side now (ie yours).

I will recode the FMS->HTml program I did for Raptor a few years back so we have a backup copy done (every day if need be) and that the stories can be hosted elsewhere.

If in word you save as "html" I can enable (temporarily) your ability to post raw html code to this forum. I dont know what itll be like but it might be worth trying.

Im very annoyed at the forum software, Ive been a programmer for 15 years now and Ive never seen a databse solution such as these forums where it allows relationship integrity to fail (ie A topic must have posts, you cannot delete the topic without deleting the posts, likewise you cannot delete all the posts without deleting the topic. On the same note you cannot delete a post and the threads post count not be changed). This forum software does not enforce any of that :/

So you know, Ive raised it with Marc Duffy who amongst other things is responsible for our online base (I think!) and Miles Jacobson (MD of SIGames) so its being chucked up to the top.

On another sidenote, I have apparently got an affirmative response back from groupee that my request for forum specific "grace post editing" , the ability to edit your own posts withing say 15-30mins is in version 2. So this should be of benefit.

Apologies BobBev, I hope you can find it to post your stories again as it really is a forum I like reading (I wont post my own story, Im not very good )

[Gricehead]

Your efforts are appreciated Kris, especially as it's a busy time for you at the moment. Sorry I ranted at you yesterday.

Colin (calmed down a bit now)

[Brian of Nazareth]

yeah, as above, thanks for the assistance and informing us of the problems, but I think most people know it's not your fault

the return of the editing tool is a wonderful sweetner though