Forum Downtime

From GFWiki

Throughout its history, GFF has had many minor and several major crashes, some of which required full restarts and deleted all archival material.

Table of contents

1 Major crashes

1.1 2002.09.10 - The Great, Great Crash
1.2 2003.05.07 - The Great Crash
1.3 2006.02.09 - The New Crash
1.4 2007.03.29 - The End?
1.5 2007.04.25 - The End and Rebirth

2 Downtime history

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Major crashes

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2002.09.10 - The Great, Great Crash

Nineteen and a half months of memories, good and bad, along with the starts of a good many GFF veterans were wiped out on this terrible day. Legend has it that bobo, a then 17-year-old Asian stock market wünderkind, ran up a $41,000 internet bill, most likely due to his open-door policy with Gamingforce Audio. Not even someone as asian as bobo could handle that expense, so the site disappeared from existence. It was restarted a couple of weeks later, but after just two days went down again for one reason or another. Finally, in mid-October 2002, Gamingforce would be back for good. That is, until...

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2003.05.07 - The Great Crash

No, not Crash Landon. One time GFF went down for so long everything was erased! It happened from about May 7th to May 27th.

This was likely due to a series of fires in the area that the servers were kept, in Houston, TX, along with a failure by the server company to back up critical forum data. You know, like all the fucking posts.

The Great Crash came at the end of a series of smaller crashes and downtime, which eventually resulted in corrupting the database. Crazy things happened, like certain forums dying, image elements (ie the male icon) being stretched to inhuman sizes, that sort of thing. People kept posting and bobo kept ignoring the problem until the entire forum was unuseable and had to be wiped.

This led to one amusing situation where bobo repeatedly posted the time when the forums would be back up, and people could register their accounts. What resulted was the forums going down five minutes later as everyone and their brother tried to get a double digit member number.

Several days later, the forums went back up, as the admins wised up and didn't say anything save for, 'the forums have been up the last hour'.

There was also one other small crash right after 'The Great Crash'. The forums came up, and members started posting when a few days later, they went down again. This was only remembered by a select few members, and only because it was one of the few times those members were in the top 20 of anything on the boards (i.e. postcount).

The forums were restarted and accounts were wiped again, as GFF was built anew.

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2006.02.09 - The New Crash

Soon after, the events as detailed in New GFF occurred, and the Serious Business Elitist Forums were created. The crash lasted till March 2, 2006, and all the board data was wiped. A back up from March 2005 was made, and uploaded is a read-only archive board, but all data from March 2005-February 2006 was lost.

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2007.03.29 - The End?

After two smaller outages in March 2007, GFF went down again on the 29th, appearing again after eleven days on April 9th. While all efforts to contact bobo failed during the downtime, bobo reappeared as the forums came back online on the 9th, starting another donation drive in the face of financial difficulties. Many GFF members tried to take the opportunity that this donation drive presents to force bobo to give specifics on the operational costs of GFF. The revelation that the site was costing $400 in maintenence per month shocked many members, and the fundraising drive appeared to fall well short of its goals.

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2007.04.25 - The End and Rebirth

bobo vanished once again a short time after GFF returned and the pledge drive began, and on April 25, 2007, the forums crashed again. Moderators Bigblah and Miles, working from Serious Business, began implementing a plan that had been discussed, on and off, during the previous outage. Armed with a full forum backup that was made the day before the crash and donations from GFF refugees, Serious Business and its gamingforce.org domain name were transformed into a new incarnation of GFF. All members, posts, journal entries, and other information were carried over from the old GFF, and a new server and donation system were put in place to cover costs (roughly half those that had been disclosed by bobo for the old servers).

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