After a few days of turmoil, I have an update to share.
Articles / Blog Posts
In terms of written content, I am happy to report a complete recovery except for Jurisdiction Spotlight: Luxembourg. Out of over 150 articles, I am quite content re-writing one article. Thanks to two members sending me cached copies of the article, Jurisdiction Spotlight: Luxembourg is now back!
Very sadly, comments made after November 2015 are missing. There is no practical way of recovering those.
Images are missing, at least images that I didn’t get from Getty Images. Over the coming months, I will probably be going back sporadically and adding flags and maps for Jurisdiction articles.
Many thanks to @balboni, @Vadim, and @unstoppable for helping with the recovery!
Forum
Devastatingly, the forum posts are permanently lost. Restoring them would require near-forensics levels of data recovery. This is an absolute tragedy because it isn’t just my writing that is lost; its hours upon hours of research, input, and discussion by you that has been lost. There is unfortunately no way to get those posts back.
While it has been relatively easy to recover the at-risk-of-loss posts from Google cache, The Way Back Machine, and other sources by just copy-pasting text, this approach does not work with a forum. Even if public caches of forum posts were possible, it would take a colossal amount of time to recreate the forum (thread by thread, post by post, user by user).
The forum is wiped clean.
It took many months to build up the last forum and I expect that this dreadful loss of data will essentially put us back to square 1.
The only good news in this otherwise dark chapter of this whole saga is that the new forums are interconnected with the blog, meaning a single login for blog comments and forum posts. The two are now part of the same system. Fully backed-up, redundant system.
Vacation and Future
While I will be active on the website and elsewhere in responding to comments and forum threads, the blog will remain in vacation-mode.
I have decided to resume the blog when I have at least a certain number of posts lined up. The best times of this blog have been when I have had a few weeks’ buffer. The poorest-quality articles were those thrown together quickly a few hours before publishing.
This can mean the vacation will last for a few days or a few weeks. For one, my schedule can be very hard to predict. Furthermore, inspiration comes and goes.
— Streber
Whoa! It was a long vacation. Welcome back! 🙂
This is BS Streber, if this is your way of closing the site fine, then just say so, otherwise your claim that all is lost is total bs, the bloody webhost company you use makes daily backups of everything on all their servers whether you ask for it or not, all anyone has to do is contact them and they just restore the entire site to how it was a day or so ago, that is all you would have had to do, you don’t need to be a dam web programmer to do this shit. If you were stupid enough to think you are a programmer and purchased your own server with no fucking management and daily backup then you truly are beyond unbelievably lying. A fucking money security specialist and you want us to believe you didn’t have a backup for your site even if you were stupid enough to get a private server? BS.
I’m sorry to hear that you are so angry and frustrated.
@Streber Don’t even think about letting this get you you. Mistakes happen. BTW, might be Michael Rosmer who hasn’t even signed up on the new forum. He probably only thinks about all the potential clients he lost who were looking up his name from his 600+ posts, hence the name change to Michael Rosmer. If you haven’t found it yet you should look up: offshorecapitalistDOTcom
Thanks, @balboni! Even if Michael Rosmer was posting to sell something, I found many of his posts very helpful to other members. As far as I can recall, he never linked back to either of his businesses in public posts (no idea about private messaging, but I never got any complaints). I hope that comment wasn’t his. A good entrepreneur wouldn’t conduct themselves in that manner.
Correct, I might jump to conclusions too soon. It was just something that came up. But I agree, his comments were of great quality.
If I may suggest you change the text editor to create a new topic in the forum. At the moment the only way to change formatting or add links etc. is by clicking the corresponding button which adds the HTML tags in the text. Most people would probably just be confused. Forums usually use a WYSIWYG editor which hides the HTML tags. I’m sure wordpress has a similar option.
It’s a good idea and I have found support for BBCode in bbPress but I haven’t been able to modify the WYSIWYG editor yet. Tags such as [b]bold[/b] should work even if it doesn’t show up in the formatting toolbar.. I’ll keep digging, but based on old comments and forum posts, there wasn’t a very heavy usage of styling anyway.
What about https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e1XbtCQ9jTEJ:https://www.streber.org/2016/05/jurisdiction-spotlight-luxembourg/+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk
Thanks! The post is restored now.
Hi Streber,
Thank you for your dedication and bravery.
See you soon!
Thank you, Bastiat!