Welcome back everyone!

So roughly one week after the horrible "accident" the forum is back, or rather "a forum" is back. This forum is brand new, after some 8 years we are starting over from scratch and everyone will have to register again. Very sad indeed but one will have to see the few positive sides of it, like all inactive members are gone and we will probably have less spammers.

For those who still wonder what happened I will explain it. Basically some very bad luck resulted in worst case scenario. As many are aware we've recently had problems with high server load, which regularly caused the server to crash. This was blamed on my resource hogging oddproxy.com (currently running on a different server). While oddproxy.com was causing the high load, it was probably not always the reason for the server crashing. It is likely that a growing hardware problem with the server's hard disk was causing crashes, but it got overshadowed by what seemed to be the obvious culprit, the overload caused by oddproxy.com. If it wasn't for oddproxy.com the hard disk problem might have been diagnosed in time.

Now when the crashes became too regular I had the server taken offline to run diagnostic testing and it was then that the hard disk failed completely. For those who are technical it was most likely either the drive head that broke or some internal electrical problem. Hard disks failing happens, I've had a few fail on my PCs over the years. You always keep backups in the event of disk failure...

Just by coincidence I recently replaced my old workhorse PC for a new one, and in the process of setting that up, several downloaded website backup files were lost (I am still not sure what happened to them but I assume they got deleted by mistake before I moved them). That would not have been a problem since I had downloaded the most recent backup, or so I thought. That download was not complete and all I had was a semi-downloaded and corrupt file. I guess the server crashed while the file was being downloaded, or something.

So in short, no functional backups of the forum and the forum's database existed. The only way to get the old forum back would have been to send the hard disk to a data recovery lab, where men in cleanrooms and semi-hazmat suits opens the hard disk and extracts data directly from the disk surface. If you think that sounds expensive you are correct, if done in the US where competition is tough the estimate for "economy service" (takes longer) was $2500 plus quite some extra for shipping the disk around. Too expensive even though several people offered to chip in with donations. Launching a new forum (and later website) costs money too, so if you want to donate you can donate for that, would be greatly appreciated because I just used extra Christmas money to pay for this unexpected stuff.

Backups of the main website itself exists, since I update that on my local computer and then upload the files. I have still decided to not restore the old website, but focus on this new forum and eventually get the new main website up. As you can see this forum is based on the design of the new website.

If you've got any questions you can post them in this thread, or make a new thread. A lot of things for the forum will have to be worked out over time, such as rules and guidelines for various things.

Welcome back

Hooray! It all looks shiny. Anybody caught messing it up will suffer my wrath.

Does a test post count as messing up? Test!

Well done Daniel! You're brilliant

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Shh, he'll get a big head if you say stuff like that

But aw, he is We love you Daniel, even if you are grumpy sometimes and you have the suckiest luck of anyone else on the internet.

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Wow, you have been through alot, Thankyou for doing this
It looks good!!

It's so nice to have a new user name and image verification registration. :cool:

I like this lay-out better than the 'old' one sorry...
Well done and in such a short time!

Apparently the Default Thread Subscription Mode is set to a default of Thread subscription without email notification so I changed mine to Do not subscribe.

I noticed some gaps in the user numbering, e.g. there's no user number 4 but there is a 3 and a 5.

Hmmm, has Daniel already banned some spammers or other miscreants?