[Migration in prod.] The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

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Ancient Crystal
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Ancient Crystal »

As of writing, it appears the old forum at https://pastelland.com/forum is completely down. I'm glad we were able to evacuate before then. Not entirely surprisingly, AK's own website at http://alexvkern.com has gone down simultaneously.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, if the old boss had been an octahedron, which they weren't.
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admin3
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by admin3 »

Further, it appears the forum has gotten it first spambots - a sign of return to normalcy, really. For now, I've set up google reCaptcha, which will hopefully help.
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- ak -
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by - ak - »

Hello, everyone.

Yeah, yeah, I know it been too, too long since I last been here and... lets just say that I am sorry for leaving it in such a sorry state due to my ongoing personal and professional crisis in life. It is somewhat not better the moment coronavirus pandemic severely impacted all of us and forced me to holed up at home while I tried to get my life back in order. I have been an extremely sucky admin and I wouldn't, couldn't, and shouldn't be back in any managing role for this forum.

For now, I am here briefly to offer an explanation for the shutdown of the previous version of Pastelland Forum:

The hosting service of this forum, MICFO, has their servers badly decimated and they're still looking into the issues. Not only this forum been affected, but my professional website has also been taken offline and so do everyone else using MICFO servers. Given that MICFO stated that their servers may not be fully nor reliably functional again for weeks (maybe months), I might be forced to look for new service provider elsewhere. As of late last night, the data center has been briefly allowed all affected websites to be activated online FOR NEXT 48 HOURS through different proxy to allow customers to download full backup of their data, which I have been doing for both my professional website and this forum.

Seeing that this forum has found new life, I am happy to see it being functional again. Since this forum is working, I am considering about dropping my owned subdomain name "pastelland.com" and allow you guys and gals to take it for yourself. If you don't need it and rather stick with "pastelland.net," that's okay as well as I'll still drop the subdomain name.

If you have any questions, let me know. I might swing by and answer when I can... or not, I dunno.

Hope you're all doing okay,
- ak - (no longer admin)
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Ancient Crystal
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Ancient Crystal »

Hey, AK. Good to hear you're safe.

Seriously though, don't fret. You've done us all a great service keeping this forum hosted for the past six years, and I'm happy to take over the task for the foreseeable future. Thank you for everything you've done thus far, and good luck for the future.

On the technical side of things, three points.
  • Having control of the original domain would be good for a number of technical reasons, such as internal links posted in the forums, or users who haven't heard of the move before the old site went down completely. If you just drop the name, however, there's a risk bots will capture it and just serve ads. (Look at what happened to pastelforum.com, for example.) If and when you have time, do you think you transfer the domain name to me directly? I think this is done by contacting your DNS provider manually, but I'm not sure myself at the moment.
  • I'm glad you were able to salvage a full backup. Vortex managed to pull most data from the old forum, but not all, the one notable loss being all attachments. If you're able to send it some way - a google drive link is probably the easy solution - I would very much appreciate it.
  • Finally, I'm curious. We did this whole migration because a phpBB bug (mostly) broke the forum around 2020-04-22. However, looking at MICFO's twitter, it looks like no serious issues were reported until 2020-05-07. Was it pure luck that a severe software issue caused us to migrate just before a fatal hardware issue killed all of it, including Vortex' ability to pull backups?
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, if the old boss had been an octahedron, which they weren't.
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Sublevel 113
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Sublevel 113 »

Hi, Soullock!

I'm so glad to hear you.

Very first thing I want to say - I will never forget for all your good deeds in the past, decades of following pastel community since very early years, and especially how you took this forum from Mateuusz, didn't let it die, and maintained and willing to get it better a bit for many years. And you NEVER let yourself forget it.

If you come here, you will be welcome any time. And I believe I'm not only who thinks like that.
So I would like to see you when you're willing to post about anything. ;)

I'm very glad you're safe and sound at least, despite your troubles in personal life, I'm sorry to hear that. Hope it will be peacefully resolved.

Edit: important question: is there really no way to transfer attachements? D: I never used them, but many userd do, and their drawings and other stuff can be gone...
I dunno - are there many of them? Maybe it's not hard to ge them all, and then manually post them in their proper posts?
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Jatsko
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Jatsko »

It's really great to hear from you again, above all else to know that you're alive and at least as well as you can be. I'm pretty sure no one here holds anything against you, myself included. I hope that my every attempt to reach you to figure out what was happening wasn't too intimidating either! Just was looking for answers. Please come by when you can and when you want to, it was fun having you around :)
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admin3
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by admin3 »

Alright, we have reports from at least one aspiring member that email from the forum, in spite of my effort, sometimes is flagged as spam, or worse, is rejected completely without even going to the spam folder. It appears to be because we don't have a reverse DNS record, (that is, you can look up pastelland.net and be pointed to the IP of this forum, but you can't look up the IP and learn it's pointed to by pastelland.net) which I might be able to fix.

There may also be a problem with password reset emails, looking into that too.
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- ak -
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by - ak - »

Thanks for the supports.

I have made a full download of both my site and the pastelland.com together in a single back-up file. However, I am not sure if this is what you're looking for as I couldn't get past the initial pastelland.com page with notice about it being down. It is possible that there's no actual forum data to be found. I also have an old forum back-up from April 12, 2018. Perhaps this could be what you're looking for? I don't know, I'll have to take a look into this more.

Also, it seems that I can transfer the domain to you. It is locked to my account, but I can unlock it from my side. This should enable you to ask your hosting service to transfer pastelland.com over to you with my permission. We can try that tonight at 10:00 PM (USA Central Time Zone).

Hope this helps? I'll try to be back on later tonight. Hopefully we can take care of this before I move over to HostGator and cancel my MICFO account along with getting refund (since I just renewed this past April... hah)
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by [¦|||| »

... resolved
Last edited by [¦|||| on 27 May 2020 09:46, edited 1 time in total.
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admin3
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Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by admin3 »

AK - Alright, I've set up my DNS account to accept the domain, all I need is an "auth code" (see here) which you should either create in your web interface, or if there's no option for that, ask your current host manually. If you can do it in the web interface, it's probably under something like "transfer domain". Then, you can PM or email it to me, either should be secure enough.
- ak - wrote:
20 May 2020 18:48
I have made a full download of both my site and the pastelland.com together in a single back-up file. However, I am not sure if this is what you're looking for as I couldn't get past the initial pastelland.com page with notice about it being down. It is possible that there's no actual forum data to be found. I also have an old forum back-up from April 12, 2018. Perhaps this could be what you're looking for? I don't know, I'll have to take a look into this more.
No, the forum data should still be there - the notice about the forums being disabled was added by vortex, after all, and didn't prevent them from downloading the database through the ACP. If you just send me the backups you have, I can probably do the work of finding out if they contain anything useful.
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