I think we lost a weeks worth of posts

[amptramp]

Denial of service is one thing, but it would not account for a week of postings going AWOL.  These should be stored on the server.  Denial of Service simply means you can't get on the site.  Call the FBI or NSA - they should have your content because they record everything.  If they deny they have everything, start a thread about an Iranian stompbox.  They will record from then on.

[Hemmel]

Oh, PLEASE let us not go there!  Those things are so annoying to deal with - especially with the small, soft-focused screen of a laptop.

David, captcha doesn't need to be those wildly curved and hard to read characters. It can be a simple random 3 or 4 digit (and easy to read) number that you have to re-type in a field.
It could block the major part of spam posts on the forum.

[Paul Marossy]

Denial of service is one thing, but it would not account for a week of postings going AWOL.  These should be stored on the server.  Denial of Service simply means you can't get on the site.  Call the FBI or NSA - they should have your content because they record everything.  If they deny they have everything, start a thread about an Iranian stompbox.  They will record from then on.

Ha ha! That's a good strategy.  

Aron: Is it a bandwidth limit that your host has or something? My website has between 29 & 32 gigs of bandwidth used every month and it's online like 99.5% of the time, my host never shuts it down because of going over some limit. If it's something else, I would sure like to know what it is.

[woody alien]

Some of the lost threads might still exist on some of the search engine's caches. I found a lost thread by typing something like: "title of the thread, that I'm looking for".
In this case, Bing had the cached page, so I saved it to my hard disk.

[MrStab]

my thread disappearing meant i had to use my brain for once and have just successfully resolved a ticking problem in a compressor. it's not all bad!  maybe the servers should screw up more often!

[duck_arse]

I been trying to pique prism for 2 weeks now. maybe I should start blowing a whistle. I thought I heard an nsa somebody say they "don't keep [information/data] on innocent americans". no sense of irony there, either. so they either have all the lost posts, or they have none, and missed about the north korean fuzz box development programme.

captcha would mean I'd need to turn on 'images' ALL THE TIME nearly. on my connection, that's a bad thing.

[Kli Klis]

I won't comment anything constructive, I'll just mourn my first posts because I spent so much time on them and liked them a lot. Plus, one started this really nice thread about drilling   (I know there are loads of them already, there was some advice I'd never read though)   

[artifus]

apparently it's all our fault and our chaps down at gchq. ambiguously legally tapping into the transatlantic submarine fibre optic cables that link east to west in this one round world that we all share. or something.

*edit* sorry about that, by the way.

[duck_arse]

that drilling thread was going great guns.

if we find the/a thread in our hdd cache, what do we do with it, keep it to ourself and gloat at the board loss, or post it somehow?

[tca]

if we find the/a thread in our hdd cache, what do we do with it, keep it to ourself and gloat at the board loss, or post it somehow?

The same question here. I've re-posted my thread on an experiment that I've done using some of the info that I had written in a text file before posting at the time. Although I can't remember the users that posted there.

I always clean the browsers cache after closing  it...

[Jdansti]

Here's a noob question: does the forum software have the ability to use captcha security, especially in the areas that are being pounded by spammers?  Would it help?

Oh, PLEASE let us not go there!  Those things are so annoying to deal with - especially with the small, soft-focused screen of a laptop.

I agree that they are a PITA, but some are better than others. I can easily handle my bank's CAPTCHA, but I usually struggle on other sites. As Aron said, the problem doesn't appear to be the forum itself.

[Kli Klis]

There indeed are some very simple captcha online - one of the best I've seen is the click captcha on casper electronics - it had stuff like click the largest circle, number etc. Good enough for general spamming, I guess and yet subtle.

I've found a cached version of the drill thread, but unfortunately it's only 6 posts long. Only has my first post on it. And i've set my browser to automatically clear cache :/

[GGBB]

A simple unique skill testing question works equally as well - something like "what is the three letter abbreviation for "Do It Yourself?"  Before the days of captcha, I modified a forum I was running to use one of these and it was 100% effective.

[aron]

Weird, did a top in SSH and we are not even close to using the memory on the VPS. There's at least 600MB free. Maybe it was the word press php scripts acting up. Will monitor this.

[artifus]

lost or cached?

[aron]

No 600MB of RAM free. I have tons of disk space free.

[artifus]

i was thinking of the 'lost' week of posts. they're out there somewhere, shirley? that's how the internet works, aint it? how much of a ball ache it would be to re instate is another thing entirely... just thinking out loud...

[Paul Marossy]

Sounds like a software glitch or something. Is it possible to have a virus?

[aron]

OK the server got upgraded. We should be ok for a long time.

[DougH]

Meh, after over a decade here, I'm used to writing the same posts over and over again.

But I feel your frustration with this.

Could you repeat your tips for improving a Tubescreamer? I think it got lost in that week worth of posts.