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Friday Fun Thread for February 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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rdrama, the /r/drama spinoff site that themotte.org's code is based off of, experienced roughly a day and a half of downtime from late Wednesday until half an hour ago. This was the longest outage event in the site's history (previous record was ~7 hours) and the first that was not caused by botched code deployment.

This time, the cause is "the hosting provider lost physical access to and control over their [edit for clarity: rented] US datacenter".

[sound warning, rdrama warning, bright colors warning] https://rdrama.net/post/790694/pictured-leaked-screenshot-from-our-illustrious

The site is currently in its annual "Donkey Kong December" theme event, which takes place in February.

The most recent backup that was not hosted in the same lost datacenter is from September of last year, so there has been a substantial rollback. Admins are working to retrieve a 2/4/2026 backup from another provider, but negotiations are ongoing.

I read it as "the datacenter owner lost access to the whole data center", which would be extremely eye-popping event. But it looks like in reality, the data center owner just decided to kick those folks out. Which is always a risk, especially for high-drama platforms.

Well, rdrama is presumably not the only customer of the hosting provider that got booted. But it is entirely possible that the hosting provider only served similarly radioactive clients. Details are scant.

"Bulletproof hosting" is a thing, and they specialize on that kind of clients (and there's no reason for another kind of clients to pay the premium they'd necessarily charge). I don't know what kind of host rdrama used, but this certainly is a real thing.