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.
-><-
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.

> it's not as if
>software spoils like fruit,

It can. Bitrot is a thing that happens from time to time; it might be advisable to check the checksums on the binaries for the runtimes. Reviewing the databases is probably a good idea as well.

>> it's not as if
>>software spoils like fruit,
>
>It can. Bitrot is a thing that happens from time to time; it might be
>advisable to check the checksums on the binaries for the runtimes.
>Reviewing the databases is probably a good idea as well.

DCF doesn't have binaries, it's just a pile of scripts. (Similarly, the databases it maintains - which does seem to be the problem here - are just flat files parsed thereby.)

--G.
-><-
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.

LAST EDITED ON Apr-19-14 AT 08:04 PM (EDT)
 
>>> it's not as if
>>>software spoils like fruit,
>>
>>It can. Bitrot is a thing that happens from time to time; it might be
>>advisable to check the checksums on the binaries for the runtimes.
>>Reviewing the databases is probably a good idea as well.
>
>DCF doesn't have binaries, it's just a pile of scripts.
>(Similarly, the databases it maintains - which does seem to be the
>problem here - are just flat files parsed thereby.)

That explains when sometimes, when I try to Google something in the Forum, I get a big pile of delimited text.

Also, it could be that something in the forum has gone outside its checked limits. (Considering this forum's software was last updated in 2002, I wouldn't be surprised. You need someone who can grind through old, possibly undocumented code and find errors.)

EDIT: Or, since it has the good fortune to be simply flat files, you could have someone write new software for accessing and retrieving them.

>That explains when sometimes, when I try to Google something in the
>Forum, I get a big pile of delimited text.

Oh, excellent.

Well, I mean, it isn't excellent that that happens, but it is excellent that I now know why. That's been bothering me for months.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Looks like it's happening to Night of the Kissogram and at least one of the DSMP chapters as well now.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

>Looks like it's happening to Night of the Kissogram and at least one
>of the DSMP chapters as well now.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Kissogram was fine yesterday.

--G.
-><-
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.

Aw, jeez, it's even worse than that, it's spreading through the whole Mini-Stories board; some of them look like they're just misfiled in the board databases now, but at least one has had the negative-one-replies/duplicated-neighboring-thread-title thing that happened to the Prologue thread, and in that case the actual thread file was corrupted and its content lost.

I don't have root on the hosted server, so I don't think I can even shut the Forum off. It's time for a much more panicky email to Dave. Holy shit.

--G.
-><-
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.