Bugs and things to fix

[Nimphy]

Eek, same's been happening with my PMs! My lessons! Thankfully most of them are intact and you guys noticed it before everything else was lost. I'll make sure to copy everything - meanwhile, the weird thing is that the Blank Message Syndrome mostly hit Mith's and Sunny's PMs. I also lost a couple by Fenris (damn it, those were some of my favorite lessons!), but most of the other ones are intact (Eich, Kitty, Fen Shen, etc.)

[Sunflower]

Not sure why, but the "Preview" function is also not working correctly.  I think it has to do with the length of the posts, because I couldn't see my preview when I tried posting one of the errors from the host site's error log. 

Actually, I suspect the "Preview" problem is a *symptom* of the Silence Plague -- that's how I can tell a post or PM isn't going to show up.  And some of these "distress call" posts/PMs have been fairly short.  (For me, anyway.)

EDIT:

No, I take it back.  "Preview" didn't work just now, so I copied the posting text, cursed silently, and hit "Publish" anyhow.

IT PUBLISHED!?!! 

OK, Eich is probably right -- the "Preview" must be independent of the content-vanishing problem.  It's just that the two were happening at the same time, often enough that it fooled me into thinking one was causing the other. 

I'm still copying every posting before I post, though....

[Lenny]

Might post this here, too - both walkthroughs for posting pics that I wrote out have been affected. All posts that I've made linking images have been affected. Some seemingly random posts from random intervals throughout the past few months have been affected.

[Eich]

Alright, I've got Hushpiper on the case.  She knows more about this kind of thing than I do, and she's helping us figure out what went wrong and what we can do about it.

[Piney]

Alright, I've got Hushpiper on the case.  She knows more about this kind of thing than I do, and she's helping us figure out what went wrong and what we can do about it.

Ah, good ~ I was just about to say I was having Lenny's exact same problem. (18 of my posts are missing)

[OrigamiOwl]

Alright, I've got Hushpiper on the case.  She knows more about this kind of thing than I do, and she's helping us figure out what went wrong and what we can do about it.

Phew OK. Sounds like a plan! Detective Chief Inspector Hushpiper!

Just to chime in, for my messages 10/36 received and 4/21 sent are missing, if those proportions help.
(And also Gwenno's cosplay picture and other's stuff is gone from the SSSS Museum ;_;)

[ThisCat]

Grrrr.... Some of the poetry thread is missing too.
I'm archiving what's left of it for now. Just to be sure.

[Eich]

Alright, so...
Hush has done a marvelous job of investigating what happened, and it appears that we can restore the missing posts.  The text is still in the database, it just seems like it doesn't know where to go, and is getting caught in limbo somewhere.  Restoration is still a little up in the air, atm, but the text is at least there, and not lost to the ages forever and ever.

[Lenny]

Alright, so...
Hush has done a marvelous job of investigating what happened, and it appears that we can restore the missing posts.  The text is still in the database, it just seems like it doesn't know where to go, and is getting caught in limbo somewhere.  Restoration is still a little up in the air, atm, but the text is at least there, and not lost to the ages forever and ever.

Oh, that sounds much better than anything I'd expected. At the most I'd thought that the phenomenon could be stopped - that the missing text could be returned somehow is very good indeed.

[Sunflower]

Alright, so...
Hush has done a marvelous job of investigating what happened, and it appears that we can restore the missing posts.  The text is still in the database, it just seems like it doesn't know where to go, and is getting caught in limbo somewhere.  Restoration is still a little up in the air, atm, but the text is at least there, and not lost to the ages forever and ever.

Phew!  And hooray!  As far as I'm concerned, I can be calmer about losing temporary access to my  content as long as it returns at some point. 

Thanks to both of you for a job well done!  If there's anything we non-admins can do to help with the problem, please let us know. 

[OrigamiOwl]

Oh, that sounds much better than anything I'd expected. At the most I'd thought that the phenomenon could be stopped - that the missing text could be returned somehow is very good indeed.

Yeah! That's a fantastic discovery!

[Sunflower]

FIX'D (the pussycat one.  The other one will just take running into every romaji word with "s***" in it, unfortunately).  That was a weird workaround, but I got it figured out.  If you stumble into any more compound words that are partially censored, I now have a way of un-censoring them.

The good news:  We can now say "pussycat."

The bad news:  Some weird substitute command has taken every instance of the string "P-L-I-C" in my PMs and replaced it with "P-U-S-S-Y."  For example:

I distract myself by thinking about something compussycated, either multipussycation problems or words in Hawaiian...

This is probably a compussycated problem -- can you repussycate it?   

EDIT:  Let me stipulate that I spelled the above two words the right way, e.g. R-E-P-L-I-C-A-T-E.  So now we have proof that the substitution operates in regular posts too...

[Eich]

The good news:  We can now say "pussycat."

The bad news:  Some weird substitute command has taken every instance of the string "P-L-I-C" in my PMs and replaced it with "P-U-S-S-Y."  For example:
This is probably a compussycated problem -- can you repussycate it?   

EDIT:  Let me stipulate that I spelled the above two words the right way, e.g. R-E-P-L-I-C-A-T-E.  So now we have proof that the substitution operates in regular posts too...

Goodness gracious, that's hilarious.
Unfortunately, it's also 3 a.m., and I need to go to bed.
Still, I did just learn something rather interesting from that...  Thanks for point it out...

Hhopfully this won't be quite so funny when I wake up.

[Fen Shen]

The forum is baack!
I don't know if it's of any help for you, but while the forum was down I got a lot of different error messages.

First

Error 503 Backend fetch failed
Backend fetch failed
Guru Meditation:
XID: 270467113

Varnish cache server

then

Connection Problems
Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.

and then

Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Aand then again the first thing with the Guru. (I always imagine Guru Pathik...)

[hushpiper]

That all says server issues to me, Fen Shen. Varnish went down, then mysql, then php. It's probably intermittent server issues--high load I expect--and ~probably~ unrelated to the missing posts issue. Probably. o_o

As far as the missing posts go: I should clarify that they ARE in the database, which is awesome news, and WAY better than if they were completely gone (0% chance of getting them back). But there's no indication as of yet as to whether we can get them back in working condition on the forum itself--we have to figure out why they're not showing up first, which is proving elusive. We'll probably end up having to contact the simplemachines people for more info. So cross your fingers but don't hold your breath!