Why the Gauge went down.

S

shamus

Registered Member
Dec 17, 2000
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Let me first of all state categorically that the gauge did not crash.

I myself must humbly apologise for the gauge being off line. Technically it was my fault. I say technically because what I did shouldn’t really have happened, but it did.

Firstly I would like to explain part of the workings of the Administration board, which governs the way in which members view the gauge. I had made one or two changes inasmuch as I added some new forums as members had requested special area’s to post to. Okay, that was fine until some members started to moan about to many SUB forums and Sticky threads to scroll through. So I thought, I would try and please everyone by making a new forum and placing the sub-forums into it.

Sub forums are child forums from the parent forum, which is the main forum. So in the case of the “General Forum” we had 3 child forums from it. Just the same as in the “Photography Forum” we have a child forum called “Photo Contests”. So okay, I would create one new forum to move all the existing child forums into one place. This I did, and YEP, this is where it all went wrong.

On the administration board it tells you where to put the display number, (Order of viewing) well as the “General Forum” was at 100, I set this new forum to 99, and proceeded to save the new settings. On viewing it I noticed that the forum I had created was not above the General forum as expected, but had shot up on top by the gauge logo area. So I thought to myself I had better delete this and wait for Peter or Aaron to tell me how to do this part, so I deleted it and the rest, as they say, is history. On deleting that one forum, it took all those below away as well.

The forum I deleted was a new forum I had just created, so how it became the parent to the whole lot that vanished is way beyond me.

Anyway, - now you know what happened.

Sorry People.
Shamus

Ps I note from my logo, I am not ADMIN but a Moderator, looks like I have been demoted.



 
All is forgiven

To err is human Shamus and none of us can escape that. Being the victom of a number of my own cyberbumbles I can completly identify and comiserate with you. I'm sure that you will find the Gaugers are a forgiving lot, especially considering all that you have contributed to this great site. Also a big round of applause to all of you who worked so hard on the restoration project. Just glad to have it back! :thumb: :thumb: :thumb:
 
Hello Shamus,

I feel your pain. I used to be the SysOp for my BBS for about 14 years and have destroyed it far more times than I care to think about.....yeah, reinstalling from a huge pile of 90k 5" floppies...haha.

On the other hand now we all know that you indeed are one of us fallible humans. Many of us that have viewed and read your works over the years have often doubted that.

At least you now know what not to do. Aren't computers fun?
 
Hey Paul, so you are the culprit, eh? (At Hogwarts this would be '50 point off Griffindor!') :D :D :D

Oh well, in computers there are such traps which can wreak havoc with a program or a data base. (E.g. try the command 'rm -r /*' in a UNIX system :D)

And so you stumbled into such a trap... Nobody can expect from you that you should have known this - after all you aren't a professional software-guru, are you? We all are happy that you are one of the very top notch model railroading gurus, and as a moderator you always have done an outstanding job, too! To err is human, and now it happened to you... So what?
You learned something new - and so did I! (I also didn't know this issue about data base hierarchy - and looking back at my management of our biology database at our school I must have been lucky so far... :eek: )

On the other side, this dropout had a very good side effect: I realized how important the Gauge is for me. To have contact with model railroaders all over the globe is just great. And perhaps it wasn't so bad at all - I'm sure now we all appreciate the Gauge as a means to communicate with modeling friends still more. :thumb: :thumb: :thumb:

Thank you for your work already done, and for all you'll do for us in the future. The track washout has been repaired, and the Gauge-train continues its journey! :wave: :wave: :wave:

At the same time also a big Thank You for the repair crew, Sketch and Peter! :cool:

Ron
 
Shamus, it takes a big man to admit his mistake. :wave:

I had called for whoever caused the crash to be sacked and not to have the keys to The Gauge anymore. I see they did sack you as Admin and rehired you as a Moderator, so I guess they listened me. You are a great modeler and a valued poster. I guess you are not as good a computer tech as a forester. :D We each have our area of expertise.

I am glad The Gauge is back up and running and maybe shortly we can get it looking like it did before.
 
It's not a demotion. It's just that the database Sketch restored is from 4/28, so it's like we've gone back in time and everything that happened here since 4/28 has never happened. Dave is still the admin. ;)


Obviously, it wasn't intentional, and I don't know quite how it happened that the deletion of that one single forum resulted in the loss of 95% of The Gauge's posts, but it did. But, I prefer to look on the good side of it, we were able to save everything except for the activity from the last couple days of April and the first week of May. I hope this is recent enough for everyone so if they posted something important they can remember it and post it again.
 
The perils of the computer age

Paul, Sketch and Peter:
Cyber blunder? Like it hasn't happened to EVERYBODY else. I don't think so!!!
I could tell you some stories about our military's entrance into the world of computers that would literally curl your hair. Fortunately, WW III wasn't started a few times. Some data was lost and equipment failed but we managed to muddle through.

The most interesting, and most confounding, incidents were related to what we use to call EP's (electronic Phenomenas) (things that weren't supposed to or theoretically COULD NOT happen but did). Of course, back in the good old days we referred to them as gremlins, remember them? Blame it on the gremlins, repair the damage as best as you can and Keep on Keepin On. Anyway, the forum is back and that's what is important.
 
shamus said:
Sub forums are child forums from the parent forum, which is the main forum. So in the case of the “General Forum” we had 3 child forums from it. Just the same as in the “Photography Forum” we have a child forum called “Photo Contests”. So okay, I would create one new forum to move all the existing child forums into one place...
Click to expand...

You write Government paperwork in your free time, don't ya? :eek: :D :p
 
I'm just happy we survived this as a group.

Let's put this in perspective for those who have never been a System Administrator. Immagine you are using your computer, in a filemanager, like My Computer or Windows Explorer. You decide to create a new folder. You create it, and it is empty. Then you wife, who is very sexy and has a term paper on the hard drive, walks by and tells you it should be elsewhere. and this should be there, and that should be here. So, to appease her, you begin to move things around. Somehow, the system allows this empty folder to become the top level folder, with all other folders and data inside it, yet it just appears as an empty folder, and it's in a strange place. You believe the folder is empty, you realize it is just as eazy to recreate it elsewhere and moving it around doesn't seem to be working anyway, so you delete it. There are no warnings. Then everything is gone, and there is no recycle bin, and there is no undelete.

What do you tell your wife? I see people do this type of thing all the time and they always blame the system, not themselves. Of course the scenario I described couldn't happen on a typical desktop PC, but that's essentially what happened inside the forums. It's a terse, and unforgiving system. I've been on the phone, chat, and e-mail with Paul for the last several days pleading with him not to blame himself, because it's not wholy anyones fault.

I'll take some blame. I had experianced opinions that I kept to myself. No matter who pushed the button, keep in mind it was unlabelled.

Let's learn, grow, and move on :thumb: FIDO theory, Forget It & Drive On.
 
Hi Gang,
Well I am still Admin, :thumb: Oh by the way Will, I used to program games on a computer many years ago and sell them. Still, the computer I used then was "Steam powered" :rolleyes: :D

Shamus
 
shamus said:
Hi Gang,
Well I am still Admin, :thumb: Oh by the way Will, I used to program games on a computer many years ago and sell them. Still, the computer I used then was "Steam powered" :rolleyes: :D

Shamus
Click to expand...

I think I had one of those, when I first started in computing.
It was a Sinclair machine, it was wood fired as I could not afford the coal upgrade. :D
 
Man, it's good to be back! :D :wave:
Looks like I've been demoted back to "Deputy Flunky", but that's fine by me!
Hoopefully, we can get back to normal now!
 
Shamus, you were once a programmer and all good programmers know to wash thier hands of the entire affair,blame it on the Computer engineer and /or Developer while smugly muttering under ones breath,"I told em this was gonna happen" :thumb:
 
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