technical difficulties

I’ll try not to bore you with details, but here are some facts to be aware of:

1. Somehow in my monthly maintenance of the discussion forum, I messed up. I’ve been doing this ever since the forum started. It’s all automated. Check and repair errors in the database and make sure things are running smoothly.

This time I must have clicked something I don’t normally click, because in a fit of cleaning enthusiasm, the gremlins behind the scenes decided to clean out the closets, and they went way overboard. Every thread that had been inactive for thirty days or more was cut.

We are talking about a lot of threads. Probably thousands of individual posts. Some very interesting discussions, including the incredible discussion asdfg ran about Queen of Swords.

And I can’t fix it. I’m not sure why I can’t fix it — I have left requests for help with my service provider (generally they are quick and very good at fixing things) but it looks to me as if this is a done deal.

So I have to apologize profusely to those people who are deeply involved in the forum. It is a great loss, and I take responsibility for it. I’m not sure what else to say except, I’m braced for a shower of hisses and rotten tomatoes.

2. The weblog has been getting more and more buggy, especially around comments. So now I’m doing what I should have done a year or more ago. I’ve exported all the posts from both prior weblogs (storytelling1 and storytelling2) to WordPress. Everything comes along for the ride — including all the comments, right back to October of 2003 when I first started this business.

When I’m sure it’s working as it should, there will be an hour or so when the weblog is down here one database is exchanged for the other — so that I don’t have to change the url again.

I know what you’re thinking. Given the fiasco with the forum maintenance, do I really want to go fussing with mysql databases? And the answer: no. I won’t be doing this on my own. I am looking for a professional to handle this for me.