Official Forum Upgrades/Restoration Complete!

[Cole]

OK everyone, you can officially continue posting

We managed to (thankfully) recover all of this forums data, upgraded the security modules and fully updated the PHP running the site along with these forums to the latest and greatest version.

Fortunately our default style worked once again and is fully compatible with the new forum.

Thank you for your patience everyone.

[Stik]

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Cole for his efforts, and congratulate him on his success, in restoring these forums.
This website means a lot to us.
Hearing that the data had been lost was like losing a friend, and really made me think about how important to me this place has been over the years.
Hearing that is has been restored is wonderful news and cause for celebration.
Thanks, Cole.

[Cole]

Your all very welcome. I did my absolute best to piece the site back together to it's former self using past external backups. We lost a few great features, but overall I think we made more progress moving forward as the site now has much better set of secure forums & scripts. I was forced to updated quite a few games / features due to the newer server hosting, but it unfortunately outright nuked some of the older parts of the site.

Some of those lost include;
- Profiler (online character storage)
- Coat of Arms
- Phaos
- Legend of the Green Dragon
- Some older utilities (most were saved)
- news feed

I'm still restoring daily though guys. The sheer amount of files literally takes days to re-upload.

If there are any legit concerns let me know ASAP and I will fix them right away.

...and yes Stik, I felt the exact same way. I never thought I'd see the day where PADnD was just gone. Nobody has provided me with a truthful explanation yet, but I don't think we are ever going to get one. Taught me a lesson though... BACKUP UP EVERYTHING ON MULTIPLE drives. Not that I don't back things up, but the host is responsible for backing up databases daily and making tape backups of the entire site (for emergencies like this), but when they fail on their ends, it's ultimately my responsibility to have a safe and up to date backup on file.

My thanks to everyone for putting up with this crap. Also a huge thanks to those that have supported this site over the last 20 years. Lots come and lots go, but PADnD continues to live for the next generation.

Any questions or concerns can be PMed to me on this forum.

Cheers!

[Jenara]

As I said previously you are a bloody legend!
This place has been part of my life for longer than I care to admit, Losing it would be a sad blow!

[Stik]

So, Cole, is there anything that we, the site admins, or we, the general users, do to prevent the site from a repeat of this incident?

[Cole]

Not really, it wasn't anyone fault by the host. I was shocked to see they lost all of the backups as well.

You guys can help by doing backups though of the database for these forums and the gaming forums regularly. Just in case something goes wrong. However, it's more a reminder for me to do off site backups more often. We got VERY lucky the databases were on a completely different server. Other than that... just email me ASAP if you find anything wrong or something malfunctioning. For the most part, you guys just keep doing what you do.