Forum Outage

[petec]

Dear friends

Thank you for your patience over the last 5 days - it has been an extremely difficult week. Under the circumstances I want to explain what has happened.

The original error that occurred on Friday was due to the database bursting over size. On initial exam this appeared to be due to the search index going a bit mad. It proved difficult to do a backup and when I finally managed to clear the search index, it caused other errors on the server.

Over the following days I've reinstall the forum and database multiple times, including manually editing and reloading the data.

Today I finally discovered that the original cause of this was in fact a malicious attack on the old event signup which had effectively broken the database server - it's in a different database so wasn't obvious. Accordingly, at the moment those pages won't work if anyone looks at old links. I will recover those later.

A final data reload and some fiddling about and the forum is, I'm pleased to say, BACK.

Over the next few weeks I will do some maintenance to reduce the size of the database further but for now, I'm just pleased that it is back. If anyone notices any problems over the next few days, please let me know either robotwars101@lineone.net or Twitter @robotwars101

Very best regards
PeteC
Site admin

[Wigs]

Thanks for fixing and giving up time to keep it all running.

Much appreciated from this end cheers

[peterwaller]

I hope you realize how much your efforts are appreciated Pete thanks again.

[MarkR]

Well done for fixing it, is there any possibility of getting uploaded images back?

[petec]

@MarkR - images should be back except avatars...and I haven't figured out where they have gone yet.

PeteC