For the last two to three days I haven't been able to log on, I was just getting a rejection.

Also the whole forum seemed to be wiped clean.

At least now things look to be back to normal except it looks like the last few days didn't exist.

I was able to log on but all the posts were wiped.  A Decware Forum apocalypse, if you will.

Thankfully, zen has been restored.

Here's what I saw. Weds. PM (California time) I couldn't connect to the message board as I usually did. But I could in a private browser and the site was clearly foobar, as we say in the biz. It said there were 0 logged in users, the most recent post was from back in August, a bunch of threads were missing, including all of them in the General Discussion section, and CAJames was an ex-user (so was Donnie). It looked like there was a file system failure, or a bunch of files got deleted by mistake, or maybe the site was hacked. But whatever, by yesterday morning logins were working again and Lon was posting about his new dog (congrats on Memphis Lon!) but I was still an ex-user (so was Donnie) and the threads were still missing. This morning it looks like things are restored from a backup and we're back to "normal."

So thanks Steve and whoever else rescued the site!

As my old boss, who had been working on computers since they were running on vacuum tubes, liked to say: computers are only human.

Yes, it looks like the site was restored from the Tuesday night backup. So everything after that is gone.

Wednesday Toppy posted a link to a French concert. I watched part of it at 3:04 eastern time that afternoon. When visiting the forum hours later it was noticed that Toppy's post was the last that was posted and stayed the last for many hours after that, which was very unusual for this forum. Then Lon posted in the usual manner and so forth.
Got me thinking that the link for the video might have a bug. Probably not. I dug a little deeper and noticed that most the views for each thread have been zeroed out as well as 4 topic contents erased.
Very weird! Maybe someone in the know might give an explanation. Regardless, it is comforting to know Steve got our back with backups

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I think fundamentally the problem was a bunch of files were missing. Files with the threads were obviously gone, and either the files with the data about the threads or the programs (scripts) that process the data were missing. When I tried to login or reset my password Wed. night I would get missing file messages.

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Indeed. Without going too far down the IT rabbit hole, there are a lot of places that think they are doing backups but never actually check to be sure they are really working. A lot of major IT outages over the years seem like they would have been fixed sooner with a better backup and recovery plan.