Mmmmaybe. The thing is, as I've said before, the Forum doesn't use a database database; it's really just a bunch of text files with sekrit markup in them that gets parsed by some scripts. Based on its behavior during our tests last night, I'm starting to suspect the opposite is actually true - that something happened to a bunch of the text files, munging the markup in them that the forum scripts use to build the "database" in the first place. That would explain why running a database rebuild made the problem worse, I think.

Like I say, work in progress. Today is the first day of the spring semester's penultimate week of classes, so I have papers to finish and final exams to prepare for, and naturally my creative lobe has taken this opportunity to find the traction that eluded it through most of the "slow" part of the semester on various non-academic projects.* Dave, who's doing most of the heavy lifting, is only able to work on it in his spare time. Neither one of us really knows how this crufty old software works, which, as many of you may know, is something of an obstacle to troubleshooting, particularly timely and effective troubleshooting.

Some of you have offered your help, and I appreciate it, but as yet I haven't thought of a way of managing the access required to make that work; another thing I don't have optimal mental bandwidth for dealing with due to the above. (Besides which, it's not really my call anyway; it's Dave's server.) So for right now, I think we'll have to hold off on that.

Ultimately, the real solution to the problem may be to move to a more modern forum platform. There are a lot of reasons why I'm not very comfortable with that, but on the other hand, randomly losing content is clearly not something that can be allowed to happen. Losing the What's Past Is Prologue reaction thread was painful, but losing actual stories is just not on.

I suppose it could be argued that it's my own fault for using a discussion forum as a content-providing tool, but dammit, it's handy.

--G.
* Always waste time when you haven't got any. Rule 408: Time is not the boss of you.
-><-
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.

Hmm. I suppose that's possible, but one does wonder why it would be doing it now. We've been using ampersand entities since very early on, and not just in the Mini-Stories, and DCF may be old by software standards, but it's not older than ISO-Latin-1. :)

--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 is equally possible that I am seeing the ghosts of such bugs that I and/or my SO have had to fix in other software. It is depressingly easy to screw up non-ASCII handling even in quite recent code.)

Hm, yes, that seems plausible... if you've got one API that's counting UTF-8 characters -- and another one that's counting bytes -- and the code is using these counts to index into a flat text file, and expecting them to agree...that seems very much like something that could go sideways quite easily.

It also seems like the sort of thing where a system upgrade could "helpfully" change APIs' behaviors in the scripting language.

Further investigation, inferring based on some Googling that the forum is written in Perl -- Perl has indeed mucked about a lot with its UTF-8 support in recent-ish versions (recent compared to the age of the forum software, anyway).

Does the forum's environment have any of PERL_UNICODE, LANG, or any LC_ variables set?

Alternatively, if this undirected speculation -- debugging without information -- is unhelpful and/or annoying, please tell me to stop!

Perl's Unicode support is, by now, almost fractally wacky (and also rather insane). I agree that it might be a fertile place for bugs to appear.

S.

There is no better forum software, only newer :-). All forum software is shite, you just get to pick which kind of shiteness you want.

Also I'd much rather have flat text files than structured binary crap; in the worst case it gives you migration options.

S.

Sadly, near as I can tell, support for flat text files for forum data storage is a thing of the past. Wikipedia's list only shows two out of a fairly long list that support flat text, and both of those (Ikonboard and UBB.classic) are approximately as dead as DCForum. Everything that's still in active maintenance seems to run on SQL (usually MySQL).

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

Alas, no. That happened last December; we only have backups since the Great Migration in February, so I fear the Prologue reactions are gone forever. Everything that was affected in the current weirdness has been repaired, though.

--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.

Of course, I'm guessing any anti-bot codes is actually anti-spammer codes, and archive.org may have been caught in the crossfire.

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"