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What we need is a 'bit' of your time, not a lot of your time, and not an ongoing demand upon your time, but we do need a little bit of effort from our members.
Unless you have only just recently arrived at the ANZLF you would be well aware that a few weeks ago we had suffered a security issue and more tragically, a simultaneous hardware failure. This unfortunate combination of events had left us some what dented. But none the less we are still very much mobile and I am happy to announce that its time for a bit of panel beating. This is where we need our most valued members...yeah, that's you, to pitch in and give us a bit of hand
.Now I know that a lot of you were very quick with hand on heart and wallet with offers to help out and cover cost for data recall services and hardware replacement etc, and your kindheartedness really was appreciated and duly noted. But the simple fact of the matter is that Bob has already taken most the steps that money can achieve, and aside from having now laminated the ANZLF's security with the most updated version of the phpBB forum software and putting in place backup measures to ensure we never loose so much data again even in the event of a successful hack, the truth is that we will not be recovering 'any' of the data that was held on our server drives prior to the hack.
So that was the bad news, the good news is that we still have all of the data posted to that ANZLF prior to December last, back when the server upgrade had taken place, and that is what had been used to populate the latest version of phpBB and reestablish the ANZLF just a few weeks ago when we decided to get things rolling again. Even better news is that upon hearing of our crisis, a handful of our members, Markus form Switzerland (ANZLF user name: charangohabsburg), Steve from Coffs Harbour NSW (ANZLF user name: Steve) and Paul from Cape Town in South Africa (ANZLF user name: Pau) (sorry if I skipped anyone) came together as a self-appointed action team to rescue much of our otherwise lost data from the very small window of opportunity offered by the Google cache and then storing that information to allow topic reconstruction.
Now this was no small task to under take, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to these guys for their fantastic efforts, but it does not stop there. The fact is the way in which Google captures websites to cache means that nearly all of the data successfully recovered by our action team is restricted to the texts and any links within each topic, sadly this means that all 'server based' images have now been lost. Now I do not need to explain to you how important these images are to our topics so instead I will just say, 'here is where 'you' can help.
At the moment there is just four, ... (4).....that is only four of us who are working to reconstructing topics from the captured and saved Google cache data. WE NEED MORE PEOPLE HELPING US to repair the dents and reestablish our data base. It is not technically challenging work, it is not demanding work but it is quite rewarding work that leaves one feeling they have given a bit to their community. If you take this on, the first topic that you reconstruct will probably have you scratching your head a little, but there are clear instructions available thanks to Markus, there is working examples and there is help at hand. The point is that many hands do make light work and what the lads have managed to save from Google is too much to be left to us few.
We currently have a forum set up called 'Re constructors', if you can help out, you will be made a moderator of that area with permissions that will allow you to reconstruct topics to that area for reestablishment back to our main forum by the admin team. If you think you can spare a bit of your time to help us out, please PM Bob so we can get you started. For everyone else, we have a favour to ask so you can help out and feel gooey to.
Over the next few weeks, you will see some old familiar topics suddenly reappear at the top of the active topics list. Please do not ignore these posts. You don't need to do anything special, but we do ask that you take the time to have a good look through them and see if you can edit any of your own content to add any missing images that you may have saved to your own PC. Remember, just because a topic is old to you, it does not mean it has lost value to other members who may be researching that topic and the very meat in the sandwich of all that text could just be your lost image. So even if you don't have a saved copy, it would be a real nice of you if you could take a new one if possible and upload it to repair the thread.
P.S. I have already reconstructed a number of topics that are yet to placed back into the main forum. Where I have been able to find a missing image from my own resources I have done so, where I have not, I have simply typed "img~" to indicate the place where an image should be...keep an eye out for it and do the righty if you can.
Thanks in advance for your help
Cheers
Kim
and everyone else.