The same weird Forum glitch that killed the What's Past Is Prologue reaction thread seems to be affecting Agreement in Principle in the Mini-Stories forum as well. That's the bad (and rather scary) news. The good news is that it appears the story and the full discussion thereupon do still exist - clicking [View All] on the bizarrely blank entry in the forum's index that used to house the story still pulls it and its complete discussion up unharmed, at least for me. Dave has been alerted, but I don't know if he'll be able to repair it. If you go and re-read it, for the love of God don't reply to anything inside that thread; who knows what would happen if you did that. I don't even dare try to lock it for fear of vaporizing it outright.

The weird news is, we don't know why this has started happening. Yes, the Forum is pretty old software at this point, but it's not as if software spoils like fruit, and we've loads of disk space at this point, so overhead shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure yet what can or will be done about it.

Semi-relatedly, I was asked the other day in a thread about the Prologue discussion's loss how often backups are made. At the time that that happened they weren't, but since the migration, Dave informs me, we're running a full backup weekly and incremental diffs nightly. He may thus be able to restore the Agreement thread from backups; the problem is, I don't know exactly when the current damage to the thread happened, as I haven't tried to consult it in some time. If the problem is of the same vintage as the Prologue one, the backups will just have copies of the same messed-up files. (With the content itself still extant, I'm assuming it's some kind of corruption in the DCForum flat-file databases, but I don't know that for sure.)

I'll do my best to keep you posted as to the investigation and any actions taken to address the problem.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.