As many of you know, before I started CAJ, I had another site called Forum-Refuge which was just an all off-topic hangout site. Once we got CAJ going, the refuge just kinda fell by the wayside. Back in October, we did a sever swap but I never transferred the refuge over, the database has just been sitting idle on my home PC.
The refuge had several threads that I wanted to keep, so last weekend, I decided to try to get the forum back up and running on the new server. I uploaded the vBulletin software and imported the database (which holds all the thread titles, posts, PM's, user info, etc). When I did this, it somehow cause CAJ to crash. I immediately went into 'panicked repair mode' and deleted the newly installed refuge and its database, and then ran an upgrade script on CAJ which fixed any associations. Luckily, this was 3am so nobody really noticed.
This afternoon, I decided to try again...but this time I did a clean install of vBulletin and used a blank database. Once I got the site running, I was going to try to import the old database this weekend.
Everything seemed to be working okay, so I went to bed (I work night shift). While I was asleep, all hell broke loose. Somehow, this fresh install of VB started getting crossed up with CAJ, and the server started confusing the two and trying to pull info from both. CAJ members couldn't log in because it was trying to pull from the Forum-refuge memberbase, but that was empty, so it started showing people ban messages.
Anyhoo, I woke to find a bunch of messages saying the site was fubar, and I tried logging in to find that I was locked out as well. I went into the hosting control panel and followed the same procedures that I did last weekend, and it was back operational in no time.
I want to apologize to everybody. I try to do my messing around late at night and/or behind the scenes. I never dreamed that a fresh, second install of vBulletin would kill CAJ, and I still can't figure out exactly why it happened...but I know now that if I'm gonna try a third time, I'll do it in the wee hours of the morning and let people know in advance.
Thanks for your patience,
Alan