Our server has unexpectedly gone down and our server admins are currently investigating.

We’re currently investigating a random downtime that’s occurring in the past few days. In the meantime, we’ll be firing up a new server to replace the one that keeps randomly dying. We’ll be back quite soon!

Edit: New server up, it’ll take a few hours for DNS to propagate.

We are aware that our website has been hacked for two hours and have already worked actively to defend this hack. Please be aware that our data is safe and that it was only a frontend server that was attacked.

Edit: We’re back up.

There appears to be some downtime that is affecting a portion of our servers. It is due to our network being down. However, for some users, the website appears to be up. We’re currently working on resolving the problem.

Conversion #8

phpBB3 has a stricter username system where it is strict on the characters that can be allowed as a username. This means that when a certain name is already in the database, another username with a similar or same looking username cannot be used. These similar or same looking usernames were allowed in the previous database because they had different letters, yet looked the same, so phpBB2 would think they were different usernames. However, in the new system, regardless of which special characters were used, if a special character is used to make a username look like an existing username, then it’s not allowed.

Such a system is required to prevent imposers and spammers from trying to bypass restrictions put in place by our moderators.

Because the current phpBB2 system is different from the improved phpBB3 system, there are potentially usernames in the existing database that will have collisions in phpBB3. These are a small number of users (less than 300), but a number of our userbase, nonetheless. Those who have no posts will be automatically deleted. However, those who have posts, will be notified by one of our moderators and provided a period where they can reply with an alternate username. On balance, we believe that this policy for these users is fair and most efficient for the conversion.

We hope that this doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much.

No, we haven’t forgotten about the conversion and we’re still actively working on the conversion script to get it right. One of the problems we have noticed is that our database is nearly full again due to a non-optimized data structure in MySQL. So we’ve taken the site offline for about an hour to run the optimization queries.

ETA 1 hour.

Edit: It’s been an hour and it’s still running.

Finally picked up some speed, we’ve done about 0.8M topics today.

Looks like we won’t be able to finish pruning today. We’re still a far way away from finishing and, as we’ve had to slow down the script considerably to reduce the impact it has on the performance of the forum, we won’t finish pruning for a while.

The script that we talked about yesterday has been working brilliantly. After a day, we’ve finished pruning roughly 1.6 to 2 million topics from the Graveyard. We expect to do more pruning today (in a few hours’ time) and we should be finished by tomorrow.

We’ve just finished writing a pruning script that is a huge improvement over the previous one found in phpBB2. This script will run in the background with a decrease in the impact it’ll have on the serverload while running. This should help us with pruning over the week to come.