Ok I tried to post this a few days ago, but it obviously didn't work.
Holy Shit, I am so sorry to everyone for the problems that have been going on with the site.
Here's what happened and what's happening now,
- I tried to resolve an issue some users where having by tweaking some of the archiving settings. This backfired in the worst possible way, and caused all sorts of problems.
- By shear coincidence, my computer decided to shit the bed completely the second I adjusted those settings. The waiting mouse cursor appeared and never stopped. I tried rebooting in safe mode, only to find the hard drive had completely failed.
- By another shear and awful coincidence, my girlfriends computer started getting hacked relentlessley about 2 weeks before this happened. Her gmail, yahoo and facebook password keep getting changed. In effect, I'm extremely wary of using her computer for anything administrative because I don't want to compromise forum security.
- So I take my busted computer to the shop, which is normally very quick, and it winds up taking them about 2 weeks to clone the thing. They kept telling me it was going to be another day or 2 but they kept running into problems, both with the drive and with their own internal communications.
- During this time period Ryon was able to restore the cp settings to a previous state, which brought us from not working at all, to working but slowly.
- We were also able to get him into the bluehost server account and the ips account, but tech supprt has not been effective yet.
- When I got my computer back, however, the cloning proccess had only partially worked, and most of the data was corrupted. So I sent it out to a specialist who has it right now, and is charging me a fucking exorbitent amount of money to repair it. They should be done by wed.
- I asked the shop to check for signs of tampering, hacking etc, and they said they saw nothing that would indicate it. So our forum security should be fine. However I am still extremely hesitant to use my gfs computer for any of this stuff, seeing how many times her info's been hacked in the last 3 or 4 weeks. I absolutely do not want to compromise anyone's security here.
- Once my computer comes back, I'm going to completely dive into into contact with tech support while I learn to adjust all the settings of the site personally. I will make sure this shit is running smoothly by the time I'm done, if not faster than before.
This is not exactly the grand re-opening any of us was hoping for. We actually have a couple of really fun surprises up our sleeves for the sute that we were getting ready before all this stuff went down. Once we get these issue's get resolved, we'll start revealing what exactly those surprises are... All I can say in the meantime is I think everyone's really going to enjoy them :)
Thank you to everyone who's stuck with us through all this, we will get it resolved soon. To anyone who's feeling the need to take a break from the forum due to the issues, please please please check back in a week or two, and by then everything should be working just fine. Again my sincerest apologies to everyone for having to deal with the slow down. It's in no way permanent. Any questions or even suggestions anyone has in the meantime are more than welcome.
-RMH