As I am sure you all noticed we had a little trouble over the past week or so. Hopefully that is behind us now for the most part. You will undoubtedly notice that occasionally a page might have broken images or a bad link. We are working hard to get all of them fixed, so please bear with us while we dig through all the content on the site.
Additionally, you may have noticed that the Stratics Forums were affected as well. We have a Temporary Forum setup for the Sratics Community to use, and they can be found by following this link: http://vboards.stratics.com/index.php
You will need to register a new account to post.
Here is a quick FAQ of the events and about the Temporary Forums:
What's the deal with these forums?
These are temporary forums that we've put up so that communities across Stratics can continue without impediment while we work towards recovering the old forums. Again: if all goes well, these forums will be brought down in approximately five to seven days.
Why are these forums different?
We decided a while ago that VBulletin offered most of the features we custom built in to UBB out of the box - that would make it much easier for
us to do things like forum upgrades, etc. We've been doing small alpha tests of VBB over the past month or so. In terms of this downtime specifically,
VBB let us get these temporary forums set up and configured far faster than doing the same with UBB. Moreover, this will be a great opportunity for users to give us feedback on VBB and suggest features/customizations (keep in mind there are *many* "rough edges" here - our goal was to get these boards up ASAP).
What happened to the forums?
It's important to note that we take lots of precautions to prevent the loss of data. Stratics is hosted on five production servers. The forums
sit on a brand new machine with eight SAS drives operating in a RAID configuration. In the unlikely event that machine loses enough drives for there to be data loss, we contract for both local daily backups as well as local backups to remote datacenters in New York and the mid-west. That's an eight drive RAID configuration with brand new SAS drives and three daily backups. In this case, our primary data center accidentally wiped the data off the forums server while trying to install a new operating system on a similar looking machine. At the same time, we discovered that the system administration firm we contracted with at the time had not performed any recent backups in spite of correspondence with us to the contrary.
Thus we were forced to send the machine out for data recovery by a leading firm. Unfortunately, the process is very slow. Thus these temporary forums.
Why are some forums missing?
Some forums were omitted for the sake of expediency in getting temporary boards up. No worries though - those forums that are missing will return.
I have a suggestions/comment/complaint - who can I contact?
Please feel free to contact directors@stratics.com. Some one will reply within a few hours.
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