Missing Posts from Saturday 6/9/18


 

Chris Allingham

Administrator
Staff member
Some messages posted today, Saturday 6/9/18, have gone missing. I don't know why and I don't know how many. I'm going to log a support ticket to see if we can figure out what happened and if we can recover them. Please stay tuned and thanks for your patience.

Chris
 
Chris just about every post I made in the last 2 days are gone many answering specific questions about gas valves and so on. Plus my computer flagged older threads and posts as "new". Hope it helps you on your quest to find what happened
 
One of my posts in Grilling and one of my threads in the Photo Gallery have gone missing.
 
Hi everyone,

Here's what I know so far about the loss of posts yesterday.

We lost all posts between 6/8/18 8:26PM PST and 6/9/18 1:25PM PST. On Saturday night, I submitted a support ticket to our hosting/support provider. They said, "we have migrated your server in an emergency matter to a new one as the data center we used to use is having major routing issues,".

I will be asking the support staff more questions on Monday about what kind of "emergency matter" occurred and how it is that 17 hours worth of posts were lost in the process. I can only assume that after setting up the new server they simply installed the last backup which was 17 hours old at that point, resulting in loss of posts. I am also concerned that I was not notified of this "emergency matter" and only found out about it after submitting a support ticket.

So, there are more questions to be asked and answered. I'll let you know what I find out.

***

LMichaels reports that his computer has flagged old threads and posts as "new". I had the same experience. This behavior is controlled by a cookie that the forum software places in your browser that records the date/time of your last visit. I can only assume that this cookie was overwritten during the first visit to the forum after the server migration, resetting all posts to "new" status. Moving forward this behavior should return to normal.

***

I have noticed there is some email weirdness going on with emails generated by the forum mail server. This has also happened in years past when we have gone through planned server migrations. This can affect any/all of the emails generated by the forum mail server, including registration emails, daily subscription notifications, sending private emails between members, and so on. I'll be working with the support team to correct this. Thanks for your patience if you are experiencing email abnormalities from the forum.

***

On a more serious email note, it seems that some email hosting services including Microsoft, Comcast, and AT&T are treating the forum's new IP address as a spam address and are rejecting emails for that reason. The support team is aware of this situation and is working to address the issue with these hosting services.

***

That's all I know for now. I'll post further updates when I have more information.

Best regards,
Chris
 
Yeah... a pm I sent on Sat. am disappeared, too.

Yes, this glitch would also affect any PMs sent during the affected time period, as well any other actions like subscribing to posts, editing or deleting posts, changes to your profile, and so on.
 
Will they be able to restore to the forum the missing posts, threads, e-mails and etc?

I don't think so, but I'll try to learn more tomorrow. As I wrote earlier today, when they moved us to a new server, I assume they simply installed the last backup of the forum they had on hand. All posts, PMs, changes to profiles, etc. made after that backup would be lost. That's not how a well-planned migration to a new server is supposed to happen. :(
 
Hi everyone,

Here's the latest update after speaking with a support admin supervisor with our forum hosting company.

Toward the end of last week, a number of customers of our forum hosting company reported issues with the stability/availability of their forums (although I never noticed any issue with ours and none of you reported any problems). The forum hosting company determined that the issue was with the data center they were using in Texas. In the early morning hours of Saturday, June 9, the forum hosting company moved our virtual private server/forum to a new data center in Los Angeles. They did not notify me of the move after the fact (poor form, process breakdown).

The support staff is still not sure how it is that many of you were able to continue to interact with the old instance of the forum in Texas after the new instance was setup in Los Angeles. You should have gotten a "tvwbb.com not found" error during the transition as the old server was shut down and the new IP address for the Los Angeles server was being propagated around the Internet.

ACTION ITEM: This issue is being escalated to the engineering dept. to see if it's *possible* to recover lost messages/threads/PMs posted between 1:25am PT and 1:16pm PT on 6/9/18.

The new forum IP address continues to be blocked by some email providers as if it were a spam site. These include Comcast, AT&T/Bellsouth, and Microsoft/Outlook. As a result, you may not be receiving email notifications for Private Messages, forum subscriptions, forum registration, etc.

ACTION ITEM: IP blocking at Comcast and AT&T/Bellsouth have supposedly been lifted...I will monitor. The support team is working to clear the IP blocking with Microsoft/Outlook.

I will continue to post updates as I have more info to share.

Thanks,
Chris
 
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For what it's worth, updated thread postings have no clickable link, but the URL is valid. I have to do a copy and paste to see the first unread post.
 
I'm not experiencing this problem and I've not heard from anyone else with this problem.

Try clearing your browser cache and cookies and logging into the forum again. This cures a multitude of issues, let me know if it cures what ails you. :)
 
Seems there used to be an .rss feed for new posts but what I have been using is not working. Related?
 
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Seems there used to be an .rss feed for new posts but what I have been using is not working. Related?

On the forum homepage, there is an RSS feed icon next to each forum, a tiny orange button. Perhaps you need to again setup the individual forums you want to follow in your RSS feed reader, but not sure why this would have "broken" for you as a result of our server migration.
 
Although there is still an open ticket with the support team on this issue, they have been unable to recover the lost posts and have been unable to explain how this could have happened. I don't have any confidence that this situation will change so I'm going to call this issue closed for now. If anything changes, I will post here.
 

 

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