Whoops… hit a pothole

January 15, 2008 in Internal Affairs | 7 comments

A database issue arose last evening, and the solution has required a reload of the blog database from a backup taken Monday morning. As a result, all comments made between 14 January 2008 02:00 AM EST and 15 January 2008 09:45 AM EST (the latter time is approximate) have been lost. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Wordpress should have emailed me copies of the comments made during that period, so if you want copies of your lost comments, just drop me a line. Feel free to repost any comments that have gone missing.

The database issue seems to have been caused by a problematical URL in a comment. Until I can work out a way to protect against a recurrence, all comments will be held for moderation. Anything that hasn’t got a suspect URL or isn’t spam will be approved.

  1. dan l on January 15, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    A problematic URL in a comment? Maybe just not allow HTML filtering?

  2. meatbrain on January 15, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    I think it is an interaction with a Wordpress formatting plugin. It’s going to take a little research before I have a satisfactory answer.

  3. dan l on January 15, 2008 at 12:50 pm

    Weird. The plugin mixed with the bad link and took a shit on the db?

    I’m curious: What was the link?

  4. meatbrain on January 15, 2008 at 1:09 pm

    The link was from law.cornell.edu, I believe. The URL contained some characters that were being munged by a formatting plugin.

  5. Big Dog on January 15, 2008 at 3:46 pm

    I was the one who used th eurl and i checked it first. It worked fine in a browser. I emailed you after the incident to tell you that something had happened.

  6. Big Dog on January 15, 2008 at 3:51 pm

    Just so you know, whatever happened was not intentional. I might disagree with you but I would not deliberately do anything to mess up your site.

  7. meatbrain on January 15, 2008 at 3:53 pm

    I am aware that the problem was not caused by an intentionally malicious act, BD.