Lost posts and threads
 

Due to a database crash of the more serious kind, all threads started and posts made since last Sunday have been lost beyond recovery. Apologies if anyone has lost anything important, but there was nothing that could be done to salvage them. I had to restore a backup to get any posts back at all.

If you have subscribed to any threads you may also need to re-add those subscriptions. If you notice anything else working strangely, please let us know.

Since the database has been acting weirdly more than usual during the weekly backup process with odd crashes and table corruption, we're looking at possible solutions to make it more reliable.

Oh, darn. Thankfully I checked the top left of my screen on the main page. :(

Damn, that must be a fun job. Sucks that it happened, but I hope it's not too much work for you guys. Thanks for the update!

This is what happens when you guys don't talk about video games enough :carms: to make sure this doesn't happen again you should all talk more about video games.

This is your only warning.

Well, looking at the weird side, one database crash and the Egyptian Revolution never happened.

Crap.

Can this kind of thing happening be at least lessened by having more servers?

I don't know how affected I am...

Have you considered making an archival system of sorts? There are quite a few old posts and threads that don't really need to be bloating the main forum database, but could be put into a separate database accessed by a another instance of vBulletin on a sub-domain like archive.lucasforums.com or some such thing and linked to on the front page. It would also make database backups and repairs go a bit quicker, which would increase reliability and perhaps even reduce the load on the server, unless there's a sudden rush to look at LF posts from a decade ago.

I was planning to split the post table in two (post, archivedpost) and introduce an "archived" flag on threads. Any thread with that flag ticked would become locked and all its posts moved over to the archivedpost table instead. Then you have a scheduled task running that archives threads where the last activity date is older than X days. The advantage of that approach would be that from a user's perspective you'd see little difference (could still browse old threads but not post in them, use the search feature to look for posts in one go if you aren't sure of how old they are etc).

It's a fair amount of work involved in doing that, however, since it alters fundamental functionality of vBulletin, and lately I have ended up with too little free time to pull something like that off on my own, so that project is on hold for now.