The database to our site is currently going under a major upgrade. I'll be working over the next week in my spare time to begin the upgrade process. This will hopefully bring an end to the bots that have been plaguing our sites lately. It's going to take a lot of work because of all the changes that need to occur. However I'm not going to release the new site until I'm positive that there is not a single byte of data loss. Hopefully China understands our frustrations with their bots.... :misc_crash:
[Update]
Wow.... What a find. I was cleaning out the closet and I came across some old Hard Drives. Not knowing what was on them, I hooked them up to see if there was any worthwhile data on them and I stumble upon a treasure chest. A long time ago I had written an php/sql script that once a week would run a database and website backup and would ftp those backups locally on to a spare drive/server I had online at that time. Well this drive consisted of nothing more than that server and those old backups. The data contained was from January 1st, 2005!!! The majority of you here will remember that data. And I'm excited to see if I can still use this data. I know some of you had expressed your oppinion that we should be using vbulletin forums. At one time, we once did. But the amount of work involved/data loss would be too much (We've done it how many times now?) So what I'm going to attempt is this. Bring that data/site back online, and see if its possible to merge that good ole data into newer vbulletin databases. If it's possible I might be contemplating restoring our vbulletin licenses and updating the site fresh with vB. Lets see how this goes, if for nothing more then a walk down memory lane! I'll post my findings if this becomes workable. [/Update]
[Update=1/18/10]
Rooting through all of the data and attempting to reconstruct it in a usable manner is becoming a chore. However I'm determined to get it going again. At the very least I want to be able to get all of the forum data from vBulletin going again. The problem is all of the SQL & PHP updates that have occurred over the years and trying to customize the backups around those changes. It would be too much work to go back and reconstruct the existing backup data and conform it to the new standards. The data seems to be intact however getting it to import correctly is work in itself. There are numerous problems and without testing each and every line, I have literally been uploading the backup and reconstructing the data based on the errors I'm getting back. It's a 75 meg backup and I have worries either using regex or a text editor to make changes. Although tedious this is the only way I see feasible at this point to get the data back. This may take awhile but will hopefully be for the better in the end. :misc_ripped: [/Update]
[Update=1/29/10]
WTF! Is all I can say. I've been working on this for over a week now and finally today I got the first successful import! This can be huge. My only hope is that the database structure remains intact and usable for a vBulletin upgrade! I'll be working on getting this database upgraded for the newest versions of vB 3.x.xx (4 looks like it sucks!). Let's hope this works, if not I'll keep plugging away until it does. More to come [/Update]
More to come 
