Where are all the posts, anyway? Does anyone use this?!

[Admin]

Yes, they do...but not in the current Liftlines format. Let me explain.

Back in early August 2004, a database corruption brought down our Liftlines BBS. We toiled endlessly in an attempt to discover the cause and the fix, to no avail, therafter turning to the creator of the CGI script used to create and maintain Liftlines. Alas, the creator seemed to have little motivation to solve our problems, and the boards remained hopelessly broken.

The bad news: We lost over 5,000 current and archived postings to the Lift Corral section of Liftlines. We're still trying to recover them, but we're not holding out hope any longer.

Here's a link to what's left of them:
http://www.firsttracksonline.com/discus ... 1095863632

Edit Sept. 28, 2004: We've managed to recover everything through June 4, 2004! Whew!

The good news: We're back, and better than ever. New features provided by the new Liftlines platform enable users to control their experience more than ever before. Start posting away, it's time to rebuild the best ski and snowboard online discussion groups on the Internet!

 

[Chromer]

 

[Anonymous]

 

[Anonymous]

Man, oh man...you ask for beta testers, and this is what you get. Go figger. :lol:

 

[Anonymous]

I congratulate Marc on restoring the message boards. BUT I'm afraid I'm going to r@!n on this parade.

The modest improvement in graphics etc. does not overcome the irreparable harm of losing 5,000 messages.

I'm unclear what exactly caused nearly 2 months of downtime and the loss of the archives. If it was a random bug that could happen anytime, I would suggest bringing in some systems backup. If you had lost the boards from Feb. 3 to Mar. 21 instead of 6 months later, you would have set back a great deal of what you have built up over the past decade.

As it is, it will be interesting to see whether and how soon the message board returns to its prior level of activity. After being taken down for a season and then revived, Northwest Ski Reports has never quite attained the level of 1998-99. Skier-submitted report websites are surprisingly fragmented and transitory, and there is no more activity overall now than 5-6 years ago. FTO has has the best shot at becoming THE national site, but incidents like this won't help.

If the crash came as a result of trying to upgrade the cosmetics, it wasn't worth it.

Sorry, just my opinion.

 

[Admin]

I'm unclear what exactly caused nearly 2 months of downtime and the loss of the archives. If it was a random bug that could happen anytime, I would suggest bringing in some systems backup. If you had lost the boards from Feb. 3 to Mar. 21 instead of 6 months later, you would have set back a great deal of what you have built up over the past decade.

I agree wholeheartedly, Tony. The fact that we've lost over 5,000 messages has truly killed me, and I agree that we should have had reliable backup mechanisms in place. I'm still not convinced that we can't recover everything up until, say, June of this year -- stay tuned, I'm working on that, and I give it a good chance for recovery. I should know by later next week. It's now late September, and we couldn't hold off resurrecting the boards any longer on the chance that we could recover material prior to this summer's postings. Another week-plus was a week too long, especially when you consider that the danger lurked that a similar crash could occur at any time if we stuck with our previous BBS solution. If we couldn't determine the cause, we couldn't rule out that it could happen again. Backups do no good, for you may be backing up the corruption and merely delaying its effects. And there's no way to do a real-time backup, so any time a backup is uploaded it's missing any posts made since the time that the backup was created.

I'm somewhat frustrated that despite assurances to the contrary, the vendor who supplied the previous bulletin board script was not forthcoming with assistance in diagnosing the error. The fact that we had the freeware version didn't exactly help in spurring them into action.

As it is, it will be interesting to see whether and how soon the message board returns to its prior level of activity. After being taken down for a season and then revived, Northwest Ski Reports has never quite attained the level of 1998-99. Skier-submitted report websites are surprisingly fragmented and transitory, and there is no more activity overall now than 5-6 years ago. FTO has has the best shot at becoming THE national site, but incidents like this won't help.

That's my biggest concern. My only consolation is that the downtime came during the slowest portion of the year. Also, unlike the site to which you refer, Liftlines is a very small portion of what we do. Our site wasn't down at all, ever. Folks are flocking to other parts of our site, e.g. Ski News, like never before.

It's incumbent upon our most frequent users to build these boards back up to what they once were. Tony, you're clearly part of that group, and we're counting on you and the others with whom you share this distinction.

If the crash came as a result of trying to upgrade the cosmetics, it wasn't worth it.

Sorry, just my opinion.

No apology necessary, it's a valid opinion. However, I assure you that the cause was not a desire for improved cosmetics. The database somehow became corrupted during the summer when we made the move from our old virtual server to a new, dedicated server at our web host. Concurrently, we were forced to upgrade to a new version of the old BBS script as the old version was no longer "supported." Pity, for the "support" turned out to be ineffective after all.

This new script, phpBB is much more robust than the previous one -- it's not just a pretty face. It uses a MySQL database server to maintain the postings and avoid the very type of corruption that we incurred with the previous board. Furthermore, it includes a built-in backup utility. I spent countless hours trying to learn both PHP and MySQL for the first time, as working arcane command line code ain't easy for a guy who really isn't a tech guru in the first place.

Again, hang in there...I believe that we can restore a backup made at an earlier time.

 

[riverc0il]

congradulations mark on getting the forums back up and running! there has certainly been a void in the summer time discussion on the web with the absence of FTO forums. i look forward to our annual roasting of killington for not opening early enough and endless discussion on why with pros and cons! :lol:

kidding aside, while the lose of 5000 messages is a devistating blow, it may prove to be a fair trade off with the new upgrade. the lose of that knowledge base and history is tragic; however, in moving into the future i think the new format with better features and usability will drive more traffic and posters (and thus more reports and information) through these forums. i suspect many people saw the older forum and regarded it as being in the stone age and simply didn't bother posting. i seriously believe the phpBB forum has really set the standard on the net and presents a more interactive and engaging community set up. with a little promotions in the right places, FTO forums really should be able to position itself as THE place to go for the best reports nation wide.

another northeast skiing forum, T4T experienced a similar boost in traffic and forum posters when it upgraded to a better forum platform. i am not a regular poster on that forum, but i am amazed at the increase in posters and posts in just a few years since the forum was upgraded.

i noticed there is no reference of "No Bull Ski Reports" and it's called just liftlines. i can't remember if this occured during the merger of liftlines and ski reports in the previous forum or not. i always liked that "No Bull" logo and label. will that be coming back?

cheers!

 

[Admin]

i noticed there is no reference of "No Bull Ski Reports" and it's called just liftlines. i can't remember if this occured during the merger of liftlines and ski reports in the previous forum or not. i always liked that "No Bull" logo and label. will that be coming back?

Yep, it'll be back...I just haven't figured out where to put it yet. It was easy to put different logos in different sections of the old board, and the templates on phpBB aren't yet that intuitive to me. I suppose that I could rearrange that logo in much the same way that I rearranged the Liftlines logo, and put it on the right-hand side of the header, with the welcome message between the two logos. That's an animated graphic, so it would be a bit more work. Perhaps it's time to make it a static image anyway.

Welcome back, rivercOil!

Sleep...I need sleep...

 

[riverc0il]

nice

search new topics only link works well. this feature will probably help increase awareness of other sections of the forum, especially those of us who have only posted in the eastern north america section.

 

[Anonymous]

Welcome back FTO. Congratulations Marc on getting the forum back on line.

Like Tony, yourself and others I am sure, I am devastated by the lost of the 5,000 messages. What a real gold mine in archives, story and incredible report.

I just hoping that you be able to recover part of them.

Welcome back and Congrats once again.

 

[Anonymous]

welcome back... glad it's back
and in ref: to rivers post, like ronald reagan once said, " there you go again"... i don't think the issue about K is the opening day... but rather closing too early!!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[Max]

It's great to see this forum back! The layout is great - feels like it has entered the 21st century. Of course easy picture-posting would help make it top notch.

Good job Marc!

i don't think the issue about K is the opening day... but rather closing too early!!!!

I think even HAD the prior posts not disappeared, we would still have held the same discussion.

 

[Anonymous]

While viewing Max's NZ pics, it appeared to me that the new FTO format is the same as ZoneSki's. Since ZoneSki accepts pics (at higher resolution than old FTO format), when will FTO be able to do the same?

The viewing on ZoneSki also made new FTO navigation more obvious.

I should retract some of the criticism. It seems that this summer's crash was "an accident waiting to happen" and we're lucky it didn't happen 6 months earlier.

Good luck with the archive retrieval.

 

[Admin]

While viewing Max's NZ pics, it appeared to me that the new FTO format is the same as ZoneSki's. Since ZoneSki accepts pics (at higher resolution than old FTO format), when will FTO be able to do the same?

We've actually got two topics running right now addressing these issues, and right now they're split between this thread and the one over here. I've just answered this question in the one over here.

The viewing on ZoneSki also made new FTO navigation more obvious.

That's because ZoneSki is also using the phpBB script for its operation.

I should retract some of the criticism. It seems that this summer's crash was "an accident waiting to happen" and we're lucky it didn't happen 6 months earlier.

Very true. If it didn't happen in August, it would've happened thereafter. Keep in mind that this is the second time this summer that the database crashed in the exact same manner. Remember the crash in June that wiped out about 10 days of postings? The exact same thing happened back then as happened in August. I was able at that time to restore the data from a backup made 10 days earlier because that backup was made at the time of the switch from the old virtual server to the new dedicated one, thus the 10 days of lost posts. Then, when the incrementation of the restored-from-backup database reached that same glitch on August 4, the crash happened again. As mentioned earlier, those backups only preserved the database glitch to ensure that it would happen again and again. I sure as hell couldn't find the error in the database, and the vendor was not helpful in working to discover it.

Good luck with the archive retrieval.

Thanks -- let's all keep our fingers crossed!

 

[Anonymous]

Finally they're back !

I just registered and waiting to get my account open.

Funny to have the exact same layout than Zoneski !

Anyway, I'm hopeful the forum will be alive just like the 2 last seasons !

Hey... last year, I skied on october 20........it's within a month !

I can't wait any longer....... I WANNA SNOW !!!!!!!!

 

[Anonymous]

Nice to see a forum back up! Ironically, it came back the very same day my ASC pass arrived (the subject of which was more or less where we left off)!

Anyway, in the not-too-distant past this time of Sept meant the season was as little as a week away- sadly no more, but the smell *is* in the air....

 

[Anonymous]

Fabulous to see the board back, though the loss of all the old messages is terrible. I actually miss the discussions more over the summer than the winter, as in the winter I don't need FTO to get a skiing fix!

I'm a little puzzled about the lost messages though: does the backup from the shift to the new forum (in May or June) still exist? Would it be possible to just reload that, in read-only form, to have all the messages restored from before then (as after the first crash)? Granted, we'd lose the summer's postings, but that wouldn't be nearly so bad.

BD

 

[Admin]

I'm a little puzzled about the lost messages though: does the backup from the shift to the new forum (in May or June) still exist? Would it be possible to just reload that, in read-only form, to have all the messages restored from before then (as after the first crash)? Granted, we'd lose the summer's postings, but that wouldn't be nearly so bad.

That's precisely what I have in mind, BD. I'm just hoping that I still have it gathering dust somewhere on a removeable hard drive, and that it wasn't on the old virtual server that ran side by side with the dedicated server for the first month of the latter's operation. I've had several local drive crashes since then, so I'm hoping that it's not on something that was reformatted. However, due to personal issues I won't be able to get to that until next week.

Here's raising a toast to the reborn boards, with fingers crossed that I still have access to the old backup.

 

[JimG.]

WOOOO HOOOO !! And it's back just in time. Can't wait to spend a whole ski season exchanging great experiences and hopefully skiing with a bunch of FTOers.

 

[Jonny D]

Soooo good to see these forums back...

but i saw snow on the webcams for Abasin and Loveland.... won't be long now...

I'm dying here in the heat....