Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
I hope I'm dreaming or something, because I logged on today to discover that every one of my 1337 posts have disappeared! What?! I've been on this forum for almost a year and all of the content that I have contributed is GONE! I put a lot of consideration into my contributions, so you can understand how extremely disappointed I am.
Yesterday, I reported another user's post as spam soon after I replied to the topic. I think someone must have then carelessly deleted all posts belonging to the last person to post in that topic -- my posts.
While I agree that sucks, I think asking who is responsible is in bad taste. Might have been an accident, and this board is entirely volunteer moderators, etc. So what good would it do to bring accountability to whoever is responsible???
You should contact an admin and ask them to look into it, maybe they can restore your posts.
I don't hold any ill will toward whomever or whatever caused this event. I just want to know what happened.
I'm sorry my reaction was so accusatory. I'm going through the stages of grief here. I think I'm hovering around Depression and trying to pull myself toward Acceptance.
It's not a complete loss -- for me. (Maybe I'm still in the Bargaining stage.) I still have all of my test code and I have 2.5 months worth of posts archived (unfortunately, I stopped archiving nine months ago). It's more of a loss for anyone who comes across the topics I contributed to (if that's not too egotistical of a thing to say). I really hope this site has a a backup policy.
Can you remember anything specific about your recent posts (something to search the database/forum for)? Some keywords, or specific topics in which you participated?
I moved the thread into a hidden forum due to the spam. This process does not involve deleting posts, so if this caused all of yours to be deleted there must be a bug in phpBB or another event triggered it. I will research this and see if I can find out where they went.
Another administrator deleted the post around an hour after I moved it. It appears the users who posted in that thread have also been deleted. We will need to figure out what happened and more than likely restore your posts from backup it seems.
I'm in the process of getting the ball rolling to get your posts restored. I'm working on securing the latest backup copy of the db to ensure it will not be overwritten. More than likely, I'll need to write a script to reinsert your posts.