Our discussion forum server (https://discuss.pirateparty.org.au) went down early Sunday morning 6th November 2016 due to a complete failure of the storage array the server was attached to at our hosting provider. This failure has resulted in data loss to accounts and posts.
If you created an account after July 18th 2016, you will need to recreate your account.
After Sunday’s hardware failure it became apparent that we didn’t have adequate backup processes in place for this system, and our IT people have worked backwards from the possibility we may have to accept a complete reset, to luckily a more recent restoration of this system as at July 18th 2016. Which means all data from the last ~3.5 months has been lost, this is a fact which deeply annoys and saddens me personally, since these forums have been one of our Party’s most used and useful platforms for encouraging participation and discussion (plus I hate being the barer of bad news).
The National Council will be discussing and reviewing this incident further over the coming days and weeks, I’m sure we’ll have more to say. For now though, we are happy to have restored this system and unfortunately have to ask everyone to continue from where we last left off.
Thank you Tom. I’ll give NC space to work out where exactly the process broke down and correct it - but please give us an update. At least we got most of the post-election stuff back. The discussions had definitely simmered down since election so thankfully not much loss but still a loss. I really enjoyed the “National Council Happenings” topic, I hope that gets rebuilt from past minutes.
That’s a damn shame. It means all the discussions here which led to Pax Pirata this year are gone. Fortunately we know there is video and that link will be posted when I have it (it was recorded by a third party, so it depends on their production schedule).
Hmm, just noticed. Since accounts have clearly been restored from the backup then those accounts have their old configurations. Which means NC changes need to be made again. I’m not the Deputy Treasurer anymore.
I have on my disk the backup of a long thread that contained more than 50 posts.
There is an online archive here, but only contains the first post: http://archive.is/C7VKZ
If I send you the files, can you restore the thread? At least as static html pages. It contains a lot of useful information (in my view), so it would be nice to see it restored.
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
itwg@pirateparty.org.au:
173.194.197.26 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 552-5.7.0 This message was blocked because its content presents a potential
552-5.7.0 security issue. Please visit
552-5.7.0 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BlockedMessage to review our
552 5.7.0 message content and attachment content guidelines. h202si2534025ita.24 - gsmtp
The .zip file contained all the files - .htm + a folder for each htm.
I created the archive again, this time including only the .htm files. I’ve sent it and this time I didn’t get any error message. It seems like it went through.
Well, maybe the software has a way to restore threads from plain .htm backups? Or maybe there is an extension or something that can do that…
In the worst case, maybe you can restore the thread as a plain and static .htm files? Or maybe you know a place where I can host them myself for free? IMO, the thread contains a lot of valuable info, and it’s a pity to be lost forever.
