YOU MAY HAVE READ my edit on “The SJA82 Circle Is Up!” post yesterday in which I added an FYI regarding the unavailable access to the Forum. This was just after Bong had registered as our 10th member. Well, it appears that the server of the free forum service (based in California) experienced an unfortunate incident recently and most data they attempted to recover are either corrupted or unusable. All forums they hosted, whether paid for or free, were affected.

Below is the message from the owners of freeforums.org regarding the incident:

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Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 10:01 am Post subject: Dear Valued Customers
I would like to apologize for the forums who lost data over the past few hours. We experienced a hard drive failure on our main database server. This was an unfortunate incident that could not have been avoided by either our host or our administrators.

We’ve done everything we can to recover the data, unfortunately most of the data was recovered corrupt. Forums that weren’t moved to the new server will be reverted to a prior backup. Any non-existent forums will need to be re-created.

We have taken measures to stop such service interruptions, as well as the slowness/downtime you have been seeing over the past few weeks. We will be using a clustered network solution, in case of one server failing there will be others to take its place. Therefore, what happened last night will never be able to happen again.

We expect to have the network upgrade completed by Monday, July 23rd. The new server network — which sets the stage for our phpBB3 release — boosts total redundancy in almost all areas, increased processing power for faster load speeds, and a 24/7 backup system in place to make sure your data is always safe. In addition, we will have the backup mod online within a few days so customers can safely download a forum backup to their computer.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience. We value you as a customer and look forward to providing an even better service after the network upgrade is completed.

Thank you for your understanding and support.

P.S. We will have the forums online within 1-2 hours using the restored backups

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If our forum happenes to be among the unlucky ones, it means we’d have to recreate it and those who’ve registered will have to do the same thing all over again.

A note, though: since we have only gathered 10 Batchmates to sign up and participate in the forum over a span of a month, I was thinking of either letting the Circle rest for a while (meaning, that if our host cannot retrieve our data, I won’t be inclined to create another one with the same name, e.g.) I know that not all of us are familiar with how forums work, or what benefits may be derived from participating in it, etc. However, if you think it is necessary to have the forum back online, please feel free to comment. Let’s give it a week — the server, as well as the comments — then we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’d like to thank our 10 registrants for taking time out to sign up, leave comments and participate in the poll. Salamat!

Now, on to the show…