BC.org Restoration

[Semah]

Hi everyone,

As many of you are doubtless aware, BC.org has recently suffered a major outage. Our hosting service has reported a complete loss of the physical machine, but we are in the process of restoring from a backup that was taken shortly before the crash.

Since the backup is being restored in a new environment, we have been working our way past numerous technical problems (required package versions that aren't supported by the host, etc.) but have managed to restore limited forum functionality.

The reason we got the forum itself up ASAP, before anything else, is to return the enormous amount of storytelling content it contains to circulation. As far as we've been able to confirm, all this content is still intact as of Sept 28th (which is when the extant backup was taken). Nevertheless, we caution against adding new posts over the next couple of days, as we're still working on restoring functionality and verifying stability. More information will be forthcoming over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, we encourage everyone to join the official Begeren Colony discord for real-time discussion and more up-to-date information: https://discord.gg/ymKqsvC

This would be going faster if the site staff were independently wealthy hypermatter magnates; unfortunately this is not the case. Restoration has been delayed due to jobs, deadlines, and other unavoidable RL issues. While we regret the frustration and worry that this outage has caused, we also hope for your patience and civility as the process continues.

[Artisan]

I want to thank @Semah  for posting on my behalf, given this past two weeks have been some of the most busy / emotionally draining work weeks in the past year.

I just want to add that the other components, such as chat/guildnet/strongholds etc are still present in our data but it may be an effort to get them back where they were given version changes, so we will continue to work on that as we can.

For those who were not in Discord, I apologise for the distress you may have felt over the last week. We tried to keep people as much apprised as possible over the last week over Discord.

[Artisan]

At this time, certain features of the site are back online.

Please feel free to post now, as hopefully we will not need to reset as we work on the rest.

You'll notice that menus and such are still in odd places, and that requires some very fine customisation work as our old menus were all customised, and such customisations were written over in the new build of SMF.

Shoutbox and Calendar and Discord widget are working.
Small features such as mentions, buddy lists, bookmarks, spoiler tags should be working.

The old chatroom is completely broken. At this point, given no one had been using it for a time, it will be removed.

The donation button is also currently broken. Please do not use - it has been removed from sidebars but you'll still see it present on the top menus.

It's not currently possible to register on the site as the original registration page with the information (answers) needed to register has been overwritten, though if you have a remarkable memory and can answer the questions, it's still possible.

Likewise, custom articles and helps including the Smuggler's Cant, etc are currently unavailable but are not lost - they are present in backup files and will need to be manually replaced over time.

[Seraphie]

Thank you so much @Artisan for your work keeping this site running and now rebuilding it from the back ups! I think each one of us owes you a drink.... or maybe something healthier than that much alcohol... For now though, please accept our gratitude. 

[Imazi]

What Seraphie said. Thanks also to anyone else helping with this. Just as soon as I get my finances back in order, I plan on donating to the site again. We need this place!

[Elaeis]

I wanted to express my gratitude for all your efforts in restoring the site and for communicating with us.  I also wanted to express some much deserved praise for the Admins and the unsung heroes who helped to finance it over the years.  I try to remind myself to chip in whenever Niarra posts one of her fundraising drives, as I know she helps contribute funds each month to keep this little community RP starship sailing.  I sincerely appreciate Semah and Artisan's desire to preserve and make accessible all the stories that have been brought to life and facilitated through this site.  I noticed that the Donations page is presently not working, but I will check back and try to donate whenever I am able.  I feel like others out there should endeavor to do the same if it means helping to ease the monthly burden for the Admins.  My Paypal account has had some problems, though.  If it was feasible to offer additional donation options that would be great.

I am very happy to see BC.org back from hiatus.  Thank you!

[Artisan]

Thanks so much for your thoughts and for your offers to donate!

The donation button isn't working right now likely due to a database mismatch. We're working on getting it working but in the mean time we do have a bit of a buffer in the account for the next month or two.

We'll try to get some kind of donation system back up in the next couple weeks. Thank you!

[SquigglyV]

You're doing great at getting the site back up!

I have to ask though, how did the hosting service physically lose the entire server? I'm guessing it was ninjas, but I never got an HTTP status code for "someone shot the server" so idk what they did with it exactly.

[Imazi]

My guess is hardware failure. Something might have flamed out.

[ThyssenKrupp]

To all of those who're helping bring this home away from home back to the heights that it used to soar at, I commend you. I had no idea anything'd happened until I noticed this post and the loss of the built-in chatrooms. Keep up the amazing work!

[SivWysan]

Was a donation option ever resolved? Been playing a lot of catch-up myself this year but I would like to help.

[Imazi]

The donation link still doesn't work. However, I wonder if some sort of third party donation set up like gofundme or something would work? @Artisan

[Niarra]

I used to donate almost every month and would be happy to do so again if that option were restored.

For the most part I've found the somewhat more limited functionality of the site to not be an issue; as much as I enjoyed the chatrooms, there hasn't been a lot of demand for chat-run events in a while. But one thing I do miss and hold out hope for is the restoration of the HoloNet wiki, as that included writing done by the community that is now lost. Heck, I'd be down for a donation drive just to help compensate for the work required to bring that back, even if it's just a backup process that lets folks temporarily re-access their work to save it in the forums instead.

[Sebrik]

 But one thing I do miss and hold out hope for is the restoration of the HoloNet wiki, as that included writing done by the community that is now lost. Heck, I'd be down for a donation drive just to help compensate for the work required to bring that back, even if it's just a backup process that lets folks temporarily re-access their work to save it in the forums instead.

Would you settle for a datadump of all available holonet pages? The format wouldn't be pretty but a lot of the stuff can be found in text.

EDIT: On second thoughts....Here I was about to scrape all the text off each page when I had the sudden thought....I could just give you the link....

https://web.archive.org/web/20181227083431/http://begerencolony.org/holonet/Main_Page

Here is the internet archive link of our Holonet wiki as it appeared in December of 2018. At the top, you can see that captures are available dating back to 2015 and up to 2019. Look through Character Records for a list of all characters that had custom articles and of course there are some starship and organization articles too. If you remember writing something but you can't find it, try going forward some months.

Beware that pages will load slowly as they're just snapshots but all the content *should* be there. I recommend saving all your articles locally. Enjoy!

Likewise, here are those articles like "Smugglers Cant": https://web.archive.org/web/20180903144805/http://begerencolony.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=15c1f40341c71132740c5ff5d47d6fd1&cat=13

[Joshmaul]

I'd have to hunt through my archives to find my pictures again, but I would love a return to the HoloNet. I like wikifying my character bios. I'm kinda missing it. :D