DATA LOSS IN THE GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUM, 12/22 [View all]
At approximately 3:30 PM ET this afternoon, December 22, we had a glitch -- an unfortunate combination of software and human error -- which deleted the original post (OP) of every thread in the General Discussion forum. Replies were not affected.
The bug has been fixed so this will never happen again.
Fortunately we keep nightly backups, so we were able to recover every original post that was posted here up until approximately 3:30 AM ET this morning. Unfortunately, this leaves approximately 12 hours of OPs that we were unable to completely recover.
For the missing 12 hours of OPs, we were able to recover the thread titles, along with other data about the thread. But we were unable to recover the full message text. On these threads, the missing text has been replaced with the following notification:
So, if the message text of your OP is missing, you have options:
1) If you edited your OP at any time, then the most recent version is saved in the edit history of the post.
2) You can edit the OP to update the message text.
We understand that this situation is very disappointing, especially if you spent time and effort crafting an OP that is now gone forever. When you post on DU, you expect your post to be there, and you expect that something like this will not happen. The DU Administrators are very sorry for this catastrophic error, and we will do everything in our power to hopefully avoid repeating this mistake.
Again, we are very sorry. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
David Allen
DU Administrator
= new reply since forum marked as read