websites temporarily offline later tonight

[Dan]

In trying to figure out the recent lag, I noticed several things I wanted to address. The one that affects you guys is that there are nine years of content on this forum. I'm in the process of deleting any thread that hasn't been posted in or viewed in the past two years. Once that's done, I'll need to take the site offline to let the tables shrink and optimize. Probably won't be for several hours yet, but just letting you know in advance.

[Lord Foul]

I'm in the process of deleting any thread that hasn't been posted in or viewed in the past two years.

That isn't what has happened, though. Instead any thread that hasn't been posted in during the past three years has been deleted.

This is annoying because, having seen your announcement, I made a point of tracking down all the old threads I really wanted to retain access to and viewing them once more to ensure they were not deleted. This mostly relates to old play by post games that I enjoy going back and reading again out of nostalgia, but also includes things like Noble Bear's card game thread with all the artwork in it.

So yes, I'm pretty annoyed that all my efforts were in vain because you didn't do what you said you were going to do, and now those threads are gone.

[Lord Foul]

One month: still no response.

[Chad]

One month: still no response.

We are sorry.

The technology behind the forums had a lot of issues going on over the past few months and nothing we did seemed to have any effect. We got to a point where we were trying almost anything to save what was a rapidly sinking ship. Part of this was, to continue the ship analogy, throwing a large amount of weight overboard in hopes that we could stop the whole ship (the main web site, the forums, several associated web sites) from going under.

You see, this ship we are on isn't just the forums (think a light fast boat) but actually a large cruise ship with many decks that do different things for FtB (Con Planner, several web sites, the podcasts front page and part of the RSS feed). Most of the time when the forums 'deck' on our cruise ship has a problem it's usually just isolated to that deck, we fix the issue and move on with our lives.

This problem was different. At this point I would like to use the analogy of the cruise ship and say we hit an ice berg that effected the whole ship... but I can't. That would imply that we knew what the issue was (the metaphorical iceberg) but we don't know. It was like everything was going fine and all of a sudden the ship just started sinking. The amount of things we tried and the amount of time and effort we put into trying keep ship afloat was nothing short of heroic, especially considering that this is our part time hobby.

None of this stopped the ship from sinking.

At this point we were at a loss for what to do so we start trying different things that we hope will at the very least slow the sinking or give us a clue as to why we are going down. One of the many ideas we tired was that we never purged the forums and that all of the old posts were weighting us down. Think of this as the cargo area (database) on the ship. Of all the different decks (sites and applications on the server) the forums took up the lions share of the cargo area and was taking up more and more every day. So in a desperate move, we decided to throw some of that cargo overboard.

We told you that we were throwing A out under B conditions and in our rush and desperation to save the entire ship from completely sinking we toss overboard everything that was X, Y, and Z without any conditions. You saw the unfortunate results of that and, even worse, it did nothing to stop the sinking.

Again, we are sorry for the loss of the older posts and the miscommunication on our part. We've tried to preserve everything here since July 23rd 2008 but the longer time goes on the greater the chance that something catastrophic will happen that will zap everything. It's an unfortunate truth of IT.

[Lord Foul]

Thank you for the response and explanation.