To go to the forums, click here

When the forums went down last week, we had to reconstruct the directories. We installed a fresh virgin copy of the forums while we stabilized the server, and kept a copy of the pre-meltdown forums tucked away.

When we were satisfied with the server’s stability, we switched back to the pre-meltdown forums, but were surprised to discover that there some directories that were being used pre-meltdown were missing. Obviously, the directories didn’t really disappear on their own – more likely, we didn’t back up all the directories we thought we were supposed to.

But at least we had a stable server and a functional forum back.

(This is that “production server – development server” arrangement that many have mentioned to me. We work on one set of forum files (“development”), while you continue to use the public forums (“production”) . Ideally, you do not notice we are making changes until we actually switch to the modified but tested set of forum files.)

Yesterday, we switched back to the virgin installation to try to figure out the missing directories problem and fix it.