Topic: SITE BACK UP--CRITICAL HELP NEEDED

[Anastasios]

Phase I of the character cleanup is complete, which isolated the most frequent corrupted characters from the failed upgrade 2 years ago.

It is very imperative that every user look at 5 threads from the past (random--this is a spot check) and look for:

1) post that appears to have no text

2) Posts where the subject name is in the body of the message with no other text present, over and over again for each message in the thread.

If there is any database error, it must be caught IMMEDIATELY.  Any problems should be reported via "Report to Moderator" immediately.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Note: There are still posts with the funky characters, since I have not replaced all of them yet--what I am getting at is posts that seemingly have no characters in them at all or the subject is repeated in the body of a post over and over again--because one side effect of doing replace operations on data is unintended consequences.

Regards,

Fr Anastasios

[Anastasios]

Thanks to the posters who have already sent me reports. Keep 'em coming!

Fr Anastasios

[Anastasios]

One more person has responded, and I am sure that others have looked and not seeing anything, did not report any posts.

I'd appreciate if we could get a few more people to do a spot check and let me know even if you don't find anything, so I know that people are checking.

Basically, if there is any corruption and we do NOT catch it, it could be a very BIG problem, which would require us to roll back to yesterday's backup, losing all the posts from 10 pm EDT onward.

It doesn't seem that there is any major problem, but we need to be diligent and work together to figure this out, as I cannot possibly catch this all myself.

In Christ,

Fr Anastasios

[Anastasios]

In case anyone is interested, here is what was replaced in Phase I:

’ --> ’
GÇÖ   --->   ’
‘   --->   ‘
GÇô   --->   -
GÇÿ   --->   ‘
GÇ£   --->   “
GÇ¥   --->   ”
GÇö   --->   —
”   --->   ”
“   --->   “
–   --->   —
—   --->   —

[Αριστοκλής]

Ouch!

[Andrea]

Father,

I'm a little confused. If we find posts with those characters (or similar) while looking in old posts, do you want those reported to you?

Andrea

[Anastasios]

Andrea,

Thank you for your question.

What is above is just an example of what I already fixed, and I am aware that there are still posts with other funky characters, so I don't need them reported.  Some have already done that, which is fine as it gives me a clue as to where to go next to fix, but what I am concerned about are two other scenarios which are possible byproducts of the fixing I am doing on these characters:

1) Posts that have no text at all in them--completely blank
2) Threads where every post is just the name of the thread repeated in each post

If anyone sees something like that, it would be very important to point out as it would mean the replacing I am doing is harming the database structure itself instead of just the text fields of the posts.

Thanks!

Fr Anastasios

[Anastasios]

Ouch!

The next thing I am going to fix is where it quotes you or Nektarios's names in Greek and it's all messed up. I will put back in your Greek names in all those posts   Also the "edited by" field in some posts....

[Anastasios]

I think it is safe to assume Phase I went well. Thanks for all the support so far. We will try Phase II probably tonight.

In Christ,

Fr Anastasios

[Jakub]

Recon Unit "Dirty Water Dogs" reports no gremlins nor orcs were observed or found...

[Ebor]

Anglican Geek unit has checked a number of ancient threads and found neither blanks nor boggarts in any of them so far.

[Αριστοκλής]

Ouch!

The next thing I am going to fix is where it quotes you or Nektarios's names in Greek and it's all messed up. I will put back in your Greek names in all those posts   Also the "edited by" field in some posts....

Somehow I feel obligated to offer an honorarium of some sort for this... 

[Νεκτάριος]

Ouch!

The next thing I am going to fix is where it quotes you or Nektarios's names in Greek and it's all messed up. I will put back in your Greek names in all those posts   Also the "edited by" field in some posts....

Somehow I feel obligated to offer an honorarium of some sort for this... 

*raises glass* για παπα Αναστασιο! 

[Elisha]

Anglican Geek unit has checked a number of ancient threads and found neither blanks nor boggarts in any of them so far.

I did to yesterday.