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ZorbaTHut  2mo ago (text post)   3617 thread views

Site Rollback to February 3rd

Very sorry about this one, guys.

For reasons that I'm currently unsure of, the database decided to eat itself. I'm giving it something like 40/40/20 "hacker", "postgres bug", or "host glitch".

The site currently has two different backup methods. The manual backup triggers whenever I do a site update; the last site update was on 1/31. The automatic backup is supposed to be daily, and I check it once in a while to make sure it's working. It's been working literally ever since before the main Motte site was launched . . . and it broke on 2/4. Good timing, thanks, system.

In theory, the quality-contribution system captured all reported quality contributions during this time. I'll try to retrieve those. Any opinions on whether I should just go ahead and repost them, or whether I should send them to the person so they can repost them?

I do have a dump of a bunch of text snippets that are all that was left of the database. If you remember some phrases you used I might be able to retrieve parts of lost posts. That said, someone's tried this with a few posts and got 0/2, so absolutely no promises here. Feel free to ask though! If you want to take data recovery more seriously, make a copy of your browser cache, which can then be pored over to find people's posts. I'm not totally sure how important this is, but I bet at least a few people will be sad to lose effortposts they made.

I've fixed the backup issue and set up better monitoring so it will yell at me if it fails again. I've also temporarily increased backup frequency to hourly, just in case there's some serious stability issue right now that I'm not aware of. The good news is that this shouldn't happen again, at least with as much lost data. But that doesn't really fix this one.

Apologies again.

This too shall pass.

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Allow me to significantly bump the “hacker” probability. At 11 or 12 UTC the site was in a state with no threads, no moderation log, and a single admin with an unfamiliar name whose account was created shortly before that.

Nah, that's exactly the expected consequence of the database vanishing - the site resets to Empty, and the first person who makes an account becomes admin.

Which doesn't mean there wasn't a hacker, just that it isn't evidence of there being a hacker.

Also, it means some poor guy picked exactly the wrong moment to make an account and accidentally discovered that they were now the admin of an empty site.

It's a pity then. I thought that it meant for sure that somebody else despises an attempt for the inter-tribe dialog as much as I do, but isn't prevented by a crippling depression from doing something about it.

Could you expand on this at all?

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