We messed up.
Big time.
We lost some tables in our main database, and discovered that our nightly backup was not taking a complete dump of all the tables.
I won't bore you with the details, but the bottom line is we've lost:
For the short term, we're declaring martial sift law across the community and deputized the top 40 sifters of all time to help fix things. The list of deputies is as follows:
zifnab
dystopianfuturetoday
kronosposeidon
arvana
eric3579
blankfist
ant
netrunner
farhad2000
mintbbb
mlx
issykitty
fedquip
dotdude
maatc
firefly
rasch187
deputydog
silvercord
zonbie
theaceofclubz
swampgirl
plastiquemonkey
winkler1
krupo
grimm
dw1117
sarzy
joedirt
therealblankman
oxdottir
sometimes
marinegunrock
youdiejoe
dead_tofu
rickegee
kulpims
fissionchips
alien_concept
michie
All user accounts still exist, but for most of them the username and other account details (email address, star points, etc.) are unknown. However, the account is still associated with your posts (videos, sift talk, comments, etc.). So we've set all unknown usernames to a simple number until we can identify them.
If you are a user whose account has become some unknown number, please re-register with your original username. Then find one of your posts or comments to determine your temporary username number and post it in a comment here to have a deputy or admin fix your account.
We beseech you to stay calm during this crisis and trust that we're doing everything we can to bring the Sift back into a semblance of order.
We're sorry. Darwin bless VideoSift.
[edit]
For the time being, queued videos will not be expired to your pqueue by siftbot since they are a couple days old now and have zero votes.
[edit]
A good way to start repopulating things you know you voted on would be to go through all the videos you've added to your own playlists. Also check out the new "oldest medals" listing on the Top Sifts tab for a listing of just videos that have earned "top 15" medals.
We are automatically casting votes for every user on every video they've submitted so you don't have to do all those yourself.
[edit]
NOTE: You will not have to start sifting from scratch. After your username is fixed, all your old videos and star points will be applied to you as before.
Big time.
We lost some tables in our main database, and discovered that our nightly backup was not taking a complete dump of all the tables.
I won't bore you with the details, but the bottom line is we've lost:
- All votes, ever. -- [update] These have been recreated!
- All member usernames who registered later than around 12 months ago
All member rankings- Your member profile info (e.g., bio, favorite sift, etc.), if any
- All activity that happened on the site March 11
For the short term, we're declaring martial sift law across the community and deputized the top 40 sifters of all time to help fix things. The list of deputies is as follows:
zifnab
dystopianfuturetoday
kronosposeidon
arvana
eric3579
blankfist
ant
netrunner
farhad2000
mintbbb
mlx
issykitty
fedquip
dotdude
maatc
firefly
rasch187
deputydog
silvercord
zonbie
theaceofclubz
swampgirl
plastiquemonkey
winkler1
krupo
grimm
dw1117
sarzy
joedirt
therealblankman
oxdottir
sometimes
marinegunrock
youdiejoe
dead_tofu
rickegee
kulpims
fissionchips
alien_concept
michie
All user accounts still exist, but for most of them the username and other account details (email address, star points, etc.) are unknown. However, the account is still associated with your posts (videos, sift talk, comments, etc.). So we've set all unknown usernames to a simple number until we can identify them.
If you are a user whose account has become some unknown number, please re-register with your original username. Then find one of your posts or comments to determine your temporary username number and post it in a comment here to have a deputy or admin fix your account.
We beseech you to stay calm during this crisis and trust that we're doing everything we can to bring the Sift back into a semblance of order.
We're sorry. Darwin bless VideoSift.
[edit]
For the time being, queued videos will not be expired to your pqueue by siftbot since they are a couple days old now and have zero votes.
[edit]
A good way to start repopulating things you know you voted on would be to go through all the videos you've added to your own playlists. Also check out the new "oldest medals" listing on the Top Sifts tab for a listing of just videos that have earned "top 15" medals.
We are automatically casting votes for every user on every video they've submitted so you don't have to do all those yourself.
[edit]
NOTE: You will not have to start sifting from scratch. After your username is fixed, all your old videos and star points will be applied to you as before.
Btw me, I'm now up to ~1500 (I think it's almost 1/4th of the votes I had amassed). Hey, this ain't that bad
[Edit] Thanks lucky! No problem on the delay, I know you guys are busy. I was mostly wondering if there was a process like recovering our accounts/usernames for getting our charter back. Thanks again!
Seriously, though, nice work on getting the ship back together.
Question: What do we do about getting our charter status back? Currently, I can only sift 3 vids.
Sorry for the delay. You're chartered again.
>> ^EDD:
I just lost 8 star points (133 -> 125). No worries, I just wanted to clear up whether they were deducted from the 8 videos in my PQ for which they might have been erroneously assigned, or is that number just a coincidence and something else was the reason?
When we recalculated everyone's stars after the crash of 3/11, we did it incorrectly (all applauded comments were counted as stars even if they were for Power Points instead of stars). I just corrected that mistake.
When we recalculated everyone's stars after the crash of 3/11, we did it incorrectly (all applauded comments were counted as stars even if they were for Power Points instead of stars). I just corrected that mistake.
There must be something else screwy - I went from 304(before crash)->303(after crash)->299(this morning). I only had 2 or maybe 3 comments applauded that resulted in a star point, and have a total of 9 applauded comments, so that doesn't add up. Also, there are some comments that I know had been applauded (15+ votes), but currently show fewer votes - is that due to missing users? This comment in particular had just hit 15 votes on tuesday. (Weirdly, even sifty's comment telling me it earned me a power point disappeared, though the email proves otherwise.)
More importantly, I seem to be missing some videos. My profile page correctly reports that I have 248 sifted videos, but if I go through my sifted listing pages, there are only 242. I doubt there is any chance I can look through and figure out which ones are missing. Any ideas how to fix that or find them?
As far as other star discrepancies in general, some might have been earned on 3/11 which is why they're gone, or they had to do with my applauded comment fix, or they had to do with possible bad stats-keeping that was fixed from old deadpool fixes.
As far as missing videos go, the most obvious guess would be that they are being filtered, e.g., by channel or NSFW or LONG, etc.
The star point discrepancy is definitely not due to dead pool fixes. I remember I stopped fixing deads (when they still gave star points) when I had exactly 46. I was approaching diamond status and didn't want 50+ star points from dead fixes. 248 vids + 7 quality talk posts + 46 dead fixes + 3 applauded comments = 304. I'm only mentioning this in case there are some further gremlins lurking in the db that you'll want to find.
Also in that vein, I noticed that the dead fix count reported on the profile page has changed. Prior to the crash, it reported (about?) 78, and now says 65. Perhaps that's related? Again, I don't really care about the number personally (there's a few hundred not reported from when only the ones that granted star points were counted), just trying to ferret out any possible db corruptions.
have luck, you'll need it, and you definitly deserve it (the luck, I mean).
I'm not sweating it .. just glad we're all still here and the site is really recovering well.
Thanks for all the hard work everyone!
Oh wait, so this post claims to have 168 comments but in fact has... significantly less... so how much of the fixing is thanks to the kick-ass deputies and how much is it thanks to additional table recovery work? You guys have done a pretty good fixing job so far...
See ^up there:
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