Starfleet Jedi

You may have noticed some forum downtime. What happened is that my host wrecked my forum database in a migration. Neither my database backups nor their database backups included the user or topics tables, though fortunately, some of their backups included a complete recent posts table.

At present, this is the status of things:

• Topics and posts have been regenerated.
• There are some display issues when it comes to the last post / posted by lines. In particular, most threads are listed as being started by "Guest," although clicking on "Guest" will take you to the actual author's user profile. This is perhaps irritating, but doesn't seem like a good reason to refrain from putting the board up online.
  Users dating back to the phpBB2 forum have been recovered.
  Unfortunately, passwords don't survive the phpBB2 => phpBB3 conversion process, and therefore must be reset (either by e-mail or manually).
  Users who joined the forum more recently have been regenerated as "dummy" user accounts listed by number, e.g., User15070. This was limited to users who showed up in the database in other tables. These users can be renamed appropriately as they are identified.
• We have new skins (three of them) and the forum software has been updated to a newer version of phpBB.

You have essentially three choices for account recovery:

1. First, if you have an old enough account (dating back to August 2009), and you still have access to the e-mail address you used then, you can automatically recover it.
2. Second, if I or someone else can verify your identity independently, I can manually reset your account e-mail address, password, or both. You can contact me privately at webmaster@starfleetjedi.net for more details about this.
3. Third, you can register a new account.

I would appreciate it if you:

• Helped identify "dummy" user accounts listed as UserXXXX.
• Let me know which of the new skins should be the default.
• Help me verify the identity of your peers, many of whom you may know current e-mails of, et cetera.

I've been able to identify a few of the "UserXXXX" accounts by lucky chance. I can probably work out more of them with some digging, but help is appreciated in that regard.

Also, my apologies if you got multiple copies of a board e-mail sent to announce that the forums are back online. Things not be working 100% smoothly behind the curtain quite yet.

Hola Grand Poobah,
I didn't need to reset my password, and I didn't send an e-mail proving I am who I say I am...
Does this mean I'm special?
My mother kept telling me I was in that hushed tone like it was a secret, but I was wondering if anyone else thought the same about me...

;)

I just wanted to say ...



And "good job!" even though that messes up the Airplane joke started at the temporary forum. Had you been unsuccessful I would've been very sad about not being able to do the post-landing third repetition. Oh, and the years of missing posts and collected data, sure, but the chance to use that Leslie Nielsen reference was really why I was here all along.

Also, this is very purple. Any chance you can turn off the board config -> override style option?

No big deal. It's just ... very purple. I mean it's a nice shade, but still.

Thanks!

Praeothmin wrote:Hola Grand Poobah,
I didn't need to reset my password, and I didn't send an e-mail proving I am who I say I am...
Does this mean I'm special?
My mother kept telling me I was in that hushed tone like it was a secret, but I was wondering if anyone else thought the same about me...

;)

Hm. Well, I had to, but perhaps one of us is special.

2046 wrote:I just wanted to say ...



And "good job!" even though that messes up the Airplane joke started at the temporary forum. Had you been unsuccessful I would've been very sad about not being able to do the post-landing third repetition. Oh, and the years of missing posts and collected data, sure, but the chance to use that Leslie Nielsen reference was really why I was here all along.

Also, this is very purple. Any chance you can turn off the board config -> override style option?

No big deal. It's just ... very purple. I mean it's a nice shade, but still.

Thanks!

Done, I think.

Check out the other styles currently on tap and see if either is to your liking. Both Hermes and ExtremeDarkRed have been purpled to one or another degree; I think the Hermes might be the most subtle.

(I may actually be able to restore the old style, if people want, but the ways in which styles are built have changed significantly since then.)

Ahh, bless you. Hermes makes me and my eyeballs very happy. Though, the unique banner on EDR was nice.

Hermes is nice and easy to read.

2046 wrote:Ahh, bless you. Hermes makes me and my eyeballs very happy. Though, the unique banner on EDR was nice.

Well, I could actually slip that banner on Hermes as well in place of the SFJ-Federation-and-Empire logo.

(It's sort of weird looking back on it. I probably should have done a Federation-and-Rebellion logo.)

Ah, lovely. Very purple, but lovely! I was gone for weeks, maybe months, when I finally came back to find bad news! Glad to see everything came back up okay with no real information loss, and even my newbie account was salvageable! Thanks for your help on that JMS!

I think I'm liking the Hermes style too, the default CA Orbital is attractive, but the transparent text background over star fields is a tad distracting. EDR felt most like the old style, but I think I'm acclimating to the new look rather quickly.

On mobile devices the starfield kinda disappears. I'd have hated on it outright had I seen the stars.

I'm on Hermes now on a big honkin' widescreen desktop, and it's fine. The SFJ Yoda & Friends banner could be added to give more identity, if you so chose, but I'm fine with it as-is. The gentle purple of Hermes gets broken out into the red Imperial logo and blue Federation logos (or, perhaps more properly, the red Imperial and blue Federation logos flow into the purple of the board at which both are discussed), so it all works on a visual and conceptual angle.

While the banner is neat, the current logo is far more elegant and fitting.

OK, given the feedback, I've set the default style to Hermes. Doing so effectively seems to have required temporarily deactivating and reactivating the CA Orbital skin. This means that if you like CA Orbital, you'll have to go to the board style menu to reset the skin back to CA Orbital.

Going through some old files and came across a screenshot of a visual favorites thing . . . it's definitely less grey around here.

First of all, thank you for taking time to recover as much data as possible. I've already experienced several board collapses or erasings in the past and they always felt painful when community members considered the amount of data lost.
Secondly, I'm baffled that the hosting provider managed to lose some data in the process. Like losing the index of all thread posters' names for one. Everything being "guested" is saddening. No way to remember or find a thread based on who started it, nor who was the last poster. It's quite something that all of a post's information can be kept, down to the time stamp and font colour, or even outbound links, but something as simple as the poster's name be lost.
Worst of all, I did have the constantly nearing feeling that such a catastrophe would happen and wanted to urge you to save all of the data in some big backup. However, it seems you did have such backups, although segmented.
The vast majority of the data is still there, it's a good thing. I just wish all of the board's posts hadn't been anonymized. :(
Still, good work!
The current theme is different to some degree but agreable.