What happened and what's next

Hello Members,

OK, it's been a hard 48 hours for me, what should have been a simple site backup server reinstall and site restore became one of the hardest jobs that I have had on this site since the start of the Joomla era.

Why did it take so long? The answer to that is simple, the site was fucked, i dident know that at the time but it was, some of you might know that the library editor was not working, i thought it was a simple problem but it was the tip of a very large iceberg, the site files where safe the site DB was on the whole OK but had some serious errors, the back-ups all 11 of them where totally fucked, if the server had become unrecoverable then the whole site was gone, we would have had to start from the very beginning, and I don't know if that was possible.

So OK I've told you what was wrong, now what I did to fix it. Firstly I performed a file and DB back up, that took over 6 hours and over 40GB of HDD space then install and set up a working web server, I used a script to get it up and running, while that was running , I checked the site DB and files, the files took almost no time I was able to get them sorted in under a hour, what took the rest of Sunday and most of Monday was the DB. I had a to check and repair the DB making sure that all the forum posts where there, all the blog posts where there, all the stories where there, all those parts where safe, what was busted for sections to do with the configuration of the site, the peripheral elements of the site, those required all the time to fix, I had to splice in bits of the development site's DB that I have her to get it to work, so after the DB check and repair was sorted I had to build a new site and add in all the important elements from the DB in to it so that it was a working site.

Now you can understand why I've had a hard 48 hours.

So now that we have a working site what do I need to do and what's left to do.

Well as you can see the menu is not fully formed, I need to rebuild the missing parts of that, I concentrated on getting he forum menu fixed and the front-page modules sorted so that people would have something to look at, so over Tuesday and some of Wednesday I'll get the menu sorted, next is the chat client for the site that will be done tomorrow as well.

Once that has been done and there is nothing else that needs my attention, I'm going to take some time away from the site, I don't know how long but I need to take a break from this site as it has been my second job for most of the last year.

I'll restore the donation module to the front-page, for site donations.

I know people has been annoyed by the extended downtime but you cant imagine how angry I've been.

Lastly I would like to thank those who has messaged me on facebook, thanks for that.

Fats

We are very lucky to have you Fats. Thank you for all your efforts, mate. You are a trooper, and even the toughest trooper needs RnR. And if anyone questions your right to taking a break, they'll have several hundred SWManiacs lining up to punch them in the face (metaphorically speaking, of course).

Appreciate your work Fats.

Please remember that there are people on here that have some experience with LAMP development, and although it isn't easy to jump into a major site and start hacking away, if you need help with little odd jobs then I'm sure some people here would try to free up some time.


R5

I wanted to update you all on where we are and what's next.

As you can see the Library menu has been restored, there is a little tweaks needed to the multi-chapter stories page but on the whole that menu is sorted, the issue of selecting one series then selecting another and seeing the first series has been sorted, the submission page for the workshops and stories page is working as expected so that's good, I might merge them to one page rather than have one for workshops and one for normal stories, if the demand is there for that I'll get it done.

The Front page is sorted, I'm still to add the donation module, that will be done very soon, I've for the formatting to a point that I'm happy with, if there is any suggestions that people can think of please let me know.

The site speed is good, I can make I faster but it will fire 502 errors at people so I've taken some of the speed out of the site to make rock solid, I'll relook at that in the new year.

The is two items missing from the site, the image galleries and the links, the links will be restored this week and the image galleries will be restored before the end of the month.

Thank you all for your kind words, it really means a lot to me.

Fats