Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Yesterday, to my pleasant surprise, our old host managed to recover a database backup for us from just before The Incident. We've been playing with it since and I can now present The Archive, a read-only version of every NuPlaza post from inception up to August 28th when everything went haywire. That means we have read-only access to everything that was lost. Hope this is useful for some of you!

(there's also a sidebar link now for non-mobile users)

Some important additional notes:

Can we restore those April-August threads to the real site now? No, this is the best we can do for posts; merging the posts database between the main site database and the read-only database is impossible for tech mortals like me. Feel free to copy over any content from there to here manually if you like, or post links, or do whatever you feel might work best to transfer, but that's kinda the best we can do (unless anyone out there has any bold ideas, which I'd certainly be open to considering).

I (or someone I know) joined after March and I see the Archive has my/their account... can we get it back now? Maybe...... I'm working on that part now. The user table is a lot easier to work with than the posts table as you can imagine, so it *might* be possible to move user records from there to here. I'll keep you posted on how I get on with that. I'd want to test any recovery effort like that really carefully, since messing with our production database is obviously a lot risker than just keeping the recovered stuff totally separate.

My account got zapped so I made a new one, now you're saying you might recover the old ones... what should I do now? IMO sticking with your new one is your best bet given than it's still pretty questionable whether I'll actually recover any lost accounts and how long that'll take. I'll leave out any old accounts that have been manually re-made since the outage if/when I do the account recovery.

My name/rank/whatever in the Archive isn't my normal one and if i knew you were gonna go preserving a snapshot of it forever I woulda got a little more gussied up. So if anyone wants me to tweak anything in the Archive in terms of usernames/kingdom affiliations to make things easier for long-term preservation etc, that's an easy thing for me to fix up so just let me know.

_____ is broken in the Archive. Oh boy I bet it is - let us know here is anything isn't working quite right in the Archive. That includes if you're able to do anything there that you think you shouldn't... Logging in, registering, posting, basically anything that might allow people to write to the database SHOULD be disabled there so if you find any loopholes I'd really appreciate a heads up, as keeping that thing locked down is key to keeping it intact long-term.


Anyway that's a lot of words to basically say: check it out!

So this is a weird and possibly impossible request - can you@Narv or an admin go and edit posts in that database?

If so was wondering if the nuplaza quote bank posts could be grabbed with all of their bbcoding? Since it's a lot to rehand code with all the images and other bits of sneaky code I slipped in for ease of finding things when I had to update? As a direct c/p won't bring any of that coding and it's all heavily coded

This is a when you can of course if possible it's not pressing

Thanks! Now I'm able to edit Naelia's bio (and the Ent Moot in Fangorn) back to the way they were before the crash (I didn't have to change much, so I got them pretty close). Maybe now someone can copy and paste the game I was playing in the Shire (called the Bullroarer Golf Tournament) before the crash (I was looking forward to playing Elanor Starsley again)?

Good to hear!

Fuin et al: dunno if I want to sign up for ad-hoc bbcode transferring personally, but what we *could* try is this: upon request, I can temporarily reactivate individual accounts on the 'Archive' board, which would allow you log in and open the editor tab on posts for yourself; that way you can grab whatever you need.

It isn't something I want to enable across the board or for a long time, as having 2 active versions of the same forum on the same domain has a lot of pitfalls in terms of screwing up logins/cookies/sessions/accounts/emails/etc -- but on a short term basis it might be a good way for a few folks to pop in, grab the formatted posts they need, and pop out again.

If anyone would like to do that for any of their posts, let me know here and I'll work on enabling access for you temporarily for that.

Thanks @Narv, top work my troll

best damn cave troll this side of Moria!

Love you longer time than before when I loved you long time

@Narv understandable I am only after the nulibrary quote banks because they are a ridiculous amount of code per I'd probably be in and out in about 10 minutes with them as if toss them into notepad and repost later. I am currently up to my elbows in pickling beets and in charge of the auger for canola atm so I wouldn't even be thinking of it tonight. (Honestly not worried about it for a bit the quote bank will live for a little bit without being restored)

Despite the circumstances that led to its inception, I think its kind of cool the NuPlaza already has a super sweet official archive. Amazed and glad it was all recovered and thanks for putting this together for us, Narv our Most Beloved Cave Troll!

What Lail said. Thank you, Narv!!

Yay for miracles! So happy that the losts posts were able to be recovered.

@Revered Grandmother I activated your account in the archive, it should be ready for you to go in and grab what you need when you're ready - just let me know when you're done and I'll restore stasis in there.

As mentioned, anyone else who would like to do that same (that is, log into the archive for the purposes of copying bbcode from 'Edit Post' boxes, with the solemn vow to not actually go editing stuff in there), let me know and I'll do the same.

@Narv I'm afraid I can't actually do anything - I went in to look I assume that I would need admin access to be able to edit posts on a closed forum? Not sure I can't get the coded part of it though. Could we try @Nessa Saelind grabbing them for me as an admin possibly?

haha oh yeah I was supposed to fix that first wasn't I. Gimme a few minutes

Thanks, Narv!

@Narv I have gotten the posts - I had to quote them so I need to remove weird spacing but 1000% better than having to do the bbcoding again many thanks you can deactivate my account in the archive

Ok cool -- FYI the edit box *should* be visible for you now, but if you've got what you need I'll deactivate you again later tonight probably.

I've got everything I needed (I went back and grabbed the three affected posts from the library) So whenever you deactivate me at this point is fine.

Thanks so much for doing that for me it made the NuLibrary update to where it was way easier.