Topic: So... a thing happened.
Hi folks. It's been a while.
I have some good news, and some bad news.
Sometime last night, GoDaddy encountered a catastrophic hardware failure (I've heard the word "explosion" come up on the internet). We were one of the sites affected by this. It completely took out our server, and it seems that they lost all of our data when they attempted to recover it. It seems a little shady how recovery went down, but that's not the point.
The good news? We have backups of mostly everything. The entire website code, the data for all of the episodes, and Teague has all of the audio files (though at this time, they haven't been re-uploaded). I've uploaded the basics back onto the server, and everything seems to be running okay.
The bad news? We didn't keep an active backup of the forum database. When we migrated to the new server, we knew we would no longer get any free backup services and, due to the fact we weren't going to update the actual site content anymore, we didn't bother to pay for an outside backup to keep things current. We also made a mistake of trusting GoDaddy's hardware to not literally explode, so perhaps that was also a pretty obvious mistake. What this means is that we lost all forum and chat data since November 9th of last year. I'm not particularly happy about any of this, from my general apathy towards the forum lately as well as GoDaddy's miserable failure in providing support to their customers, but it is what it is. I am not going to make the same mistake again and find a way to keep the forum backed up frequently so should something else catch on fire, we can take better care to restore it ourselves.
I want to say that I'm really sorry that we let this happen. I know there was a lot of great content on here that was probably lost, and I feel absolutely terrible that it just up and disappeared without a trace. I hope you guys have a bunch of it still so that you can re-share it. It amazes me how much cool stuff you guys still put out, and I hope this blip doesn't stop that from happening. We'll do better. I promise.
That's all I've got. If we lost any users you guys know of, please let me or Teague know so we can get them set up again.
-- http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Echoing what everyone else has said, y'all are fucking incredible for keeping this going so fastidiously for so long. No worries whatsoever.
