The forums are down

Several of you have emailed me to inform me that the forums are down. Thank you.

I have been working on getting them back up. I have a situation that I cannot resolve on my own and am awaiting help from my web hosting provider.

I have to admit that the reason they are down is my own pilot error. During some housecleaning, I mistakenly removed some files critical to their function. But, so far my efforts to restore them have not been entirely successful.

I should be able to get it almost all back except for a few posts. It you are into these technology things then you know how small problems cascade into larger ones. For some unknown reason, my site backup started to fail on March 2, 2010. Not a big deal, I thought, because I have never had to use it. So, I temporarily turned it off. But that successful March 1, 2010 backup, although it has everything I mistakenly deleted, seems to be missing some other important files. Files I do not have the permissions to recreate. After I restored from that backup which was an all or nothing affair, the forums won’t come up. I think it is due to those missing files.

I did do a manual forum data backup on March 10, 2010. So, once the forums are back online I can restore the posts back to the evening of March 10, 2010. I think there were only a couple posts after that time.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I will provide an update as soon as I have made progress.