So you regulars are probably wondering by now why the board was down for so long. Let me start at the beginning. If you don't want to read the long story, just skip to below the line. :p

You might've noticed that on last Wednesday (Feb 2nd) the forum was really slow half the time, and the other half you just couldn't reach it. Then on Thursday, it was gone completely. Some calls to our hosting provider's helpdesk revealed that there was a problem with the server hosting us,and we were being moved to a different one. By this time, not just were our files inaccesible, I also had no mail, no FTP, no nothing. But, well, that's understandable if they're moving stuff, right? (Well, the mail thing's not really.)

Next Friday evening, they still hadn't fixed it, though. By Saturday I could check my mail again although files and FTP were still down, but it would appear I hadn't received a single email in the time it was down. Now, this is odd, considering I gt probably over a 30 spam mails a day. A test email sent from a different account revealed that all mail sent to the account was bouncing. On Monday morning, we finally had FTP access again, but nearly all files in our account were missing. For the record, we have a 200MB account.

So, another call to the helpdesk.

They accused us of fucking with our own account, basically, because they definitely hadn't touched it. But what about that move, then? What move? There hadn't been no moving at all. No way. And that Michel, whom you keep saying told you about this alleged move, he doesn't even work here.

That sounded like a serious case of denial, but what can you do about it when it's your word against theirs? Shortly afterwards, however, we remembered that even if it's our fault, our hosting provider advertises with how they make daily backups of all your stuff, so they could at least put one of those back for us. Before we called back though, I wanted to know if the MySQL database we have was still broken as well, so I tried to log in but it wouldn't work. This gave me one of those PHP error messages that says "there's an error in /home/sites/site179/whateverPHPfileyouwereusing.php". Hey, that's odd... weren't we site82 before?

So, yet another helpdesk call. "Hey, about that move of broenink-art.nl that destroyed all our stuff?"

"There was no move. You must've deleted all your stuff yourself."

"Then why did Michel tell us last Thursday that there was, and--"

"There is no Mich--"

"--and why have we suddenly become site179 instead of site82?"

Silence. "Um, let me put you on hold for a sec." After a minute or so of some silly waiting tune, in which Jan, our new helpdesker, was probably consulting with his supervisor on this classified information... "Um, well, there actually kinda was a move, yes. And um, during it, we sorta lost some of your files."

"So will you be putting them back with those daily backups?"

"Um, we just backup essential files in those backups."

"Essential files? What does that mean?"

"Well, that includes our config files of your site, and excludes your files, email and database contents, basically."

"...I see. And what about the four days of email I just LOST?"

"Um... yeah, that sucks."

So then I decided to change hosts.

<hr>

<b>What this means:</b> We've lost one day of posts, since I was unable to make a backup on Wednesday before the site went down. We do still have all posts, private messages and members up until the day before.

Also, some of your avatars may be missing, in which case you'll need to re-upload them.

Other than that, everything should be fine. Have fun in the new Closet!

<b>ETA</b>: Azha, your files were probably erased as well, but your user account should still be active*, so you can reupload them if you want to. Sorry for the hassle.
* broenink-art.nl itself still exists, because my mother kept her stuff on there. I just moved my things, including the Closet, to a new account of my own with a different host. So your link won't change or anything either.

<small>Um, I mean, Kristian.</small>

*worships the Tancaliel*
I can't tell you how much you're appreciated for going through all the trouble to keep the forums up ^_^ Massive amounts of CoPL all around!
.... and wow, they were being asses to you -_-

~Kristian
Who is glad his site will still be working ^_^

gleegleegleeglee gleegleegleeglee gleegleegleeglee gleegleegleeglee *gasp* (repeat ad infinitum)

Oh, wow. "We sorta lost some of your files"? And that after denying it. Geez.

At least I know what was up now, but anyone who has to go through that much crap deserves a present.

*snuggles Laura gratefully* Thank you sooo much for going to all that trouble and not killing anyone. I missed the forum, and everyone here... Sorry that things were so messed up though. *shakes head* some people... But now we rejoice with forum-y goodness!

~Sara

[spam removed]

... seems the spambots are still getting through somehow.

I see. Well, before there were spambots in the sense of, they registered multiple accounts every day with a dubious URL in the website field, but never posted, hoping members would go to their sites simply because they were in the memberlist or something. We haven't seen any of those since I installed the anti-spambot mod.

But now, it seems, we're getting the oldfashioned kind, where they find a way to register and simply start posting spammy messages. We got those before the mod as well, but it was one or two messages a month at most... If it stays at that rate, I'll just delete them manually, but if the number suddenly increases I'll see what I can do.