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Forum Consolidation, Pending Issues
Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 6:59 am
by BuckGB
To prepare for an impending site renovation, I went through and did some consolidating here on the GameBanshee forums. After moving all of our game-specific forums to a new "Featured RPGs" category, I removed the old "RPG Hybrids" and "MMORPGs" categories. Unfortunately, during the process, vBulletin decided to remove the forums that were previously assigned to these categories - even though they had already been reassigned.
I'm currently researching how best to restore these forums from my latest backup. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2009 5:13 pm
by BuckGB
After 24+ hours of blood, sweat, and tears, the forums are back up and running. Here's what happened...
What I didn't realize when I reassigned the RPG hybrid and MMORPG forums is just how long it took vBulletin to make those changes to a 1.5GB database. Even though I removed the categories 15 minutes after the fact, vBulletin hadn't reassigned them behind the scenes yet and the forums in question ended up being deleted several minutes later.
So just restore the backup, right? As it turns out, I discovered that my weekly server backup didn't even come close to encompassing everything I needed (that's an issue that is now fixed).
The only full backup I had was from when the forums were last temporarily turned off - June 15th. Restoring all of the forums from such an old backup wasn't an option, so I instead opted to use the vBulletin Impex utility to bring in only the RPG Hybrid and MMORPG forums that were deleted.
Did I mention how long it takes to work with a 1.5GB database? This process took many, many hours, but luckily everything seems to have worked as intended. The only drawback is that several of our forums - including Diablo III and Star Wars: The Old Republic - lost any posts that were made between June 15th and today. A small price to pay to get the forums back in working order, I suppose.
Anyway, if you encounter any problems with the forums that you think are a result of this restore, please send me a PM. I'll do what I can to get it fixed.