In response to a suggestion by none other than Mr. Daniel Brandt, I've just added a new META tag to the board's global headers, to help prevent the unwanted caching of Wikipedia Review discussion threads and posts that have been deleted or (more likely) moved into non-public forums.

This should begin to take effect immediately, and will become increasingly noticeable over the next 2-3 weeks, as existing search engine caches are cleared to (hopefully!) respect the new tag. Within a month or so, there should be few, if any, "cache" links remaining next to WR page listings in Google and other caching search engines.

We're sorry if this causes any inconvenience for, well... let's just say "certain people"!

Someday I also hope to make it possible to prevent crawling of individual threads, or even individual posts - and if feasible, the automatic substitution of specific character strings in posts for crawlers only, based on internal BBCode tags. (These ideas are similar to suggestions I and others have made to reduce the "search engine footprint" of specific "attack" pages on Wikipedia.)

However, those innovations (unlike this one) will have considerably greater overall impact, and will therefore not be implemented without discussion in advance.

Thanks!

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of my previous attempt to change the "View New Posts" feature so as to remove the Wikipedia in the Media and (restricted) Tar-Pit forums from the feature's search results, which at that time resulted in the board being completely down for a whole week, I have just made another attempt to remove the Wikipedia in the Media and Tar-Pit forums from the search results.

And this time, I've actually succeeded! The Wikipedia in the Media and Tar-Pit forums have now been removed from the search results for "View New Posts."

(Please note: If you're not a registered member of the forum, you can safely ignore this message, since that feature isn't available to you.)

I've since put the Tar Pit back in the "View New Posts" results, at least until I can come up with a more generally-agreeable solution...

Just for the record, I actually did come up with a more generally-agreeable (IMO) solution to this a couple of weeks ago, but forgot to update this thread. There are now three "View New Posts" links - All, Main, and Non-Media. However, these are only available to logged-in members. (There have to be some benefits to registering, other than just the ability to post things.)

Meanwhile, just now I finally got around to fixing the board headers for guests, which previously always said "Welcome! Your last visit was: a minute ago." This always struck me as kind of dumb, not to mention confusing, since people who had never visited WR before would see this and possibly wonder what we were trying to imply, before (hopefully) realizing it was just a simple software design/coding flaw. The fact that it took me well over two years to finally do something about it is a testament to my almost complete inability, if not outright refusal, to do anything genuinely worthwhile around here.



Kidding!

May 23, 2010: There seems to have been a SQL write error in the forum_posts table, which as the name would indicate is the one containing all the posts, thereby making it the most important table in the whole database. This also happened while I was on vacation in a place with spotty internet service, and a certain amount of panic was involved because I hadn't made a database backup in several days...

Luckily, the handy MySQL "Repair" feature seems to have cleared it up without much fuss or bother. But I can't guarantee that one or more posts from Sunday the 23rd (and possibly the previous night) weren't lost. If you find that one of your posts from this period is missing, please post it again - we weren't trying to censor you or anything nasty or evil like that.

As for my so-called vacation, it's still (sort of) ongoing, but I do intend to check more often over the next week or so, except for possibly Wednesday/Thursday (May 26/27). Not that you really need to know that, I just didn't want you all to think I was trying to "disappear" or whatever.

Thanks for your patience and understanding!

You are awesome!

Thanks! However, we've just been offline for the last 8 hours due to something I did that wasn't technical at all, so I'm probably not all that awesome.

Just remember, folks - writing is an art form. Don't let it be lost, especially not to the Internet Youth™ of today!

Well, we went nearly a year without any major problems, until today that is - our hosting service upgraded a few of the servers in their "farm," and ours was one of them. I'm still not sure exactly what happened, but the database seems to have developed a few errors when it (presumably) got copied over.

Once I figured out where the new server was, I was able to repair the errors with the handy MySQL tools provided - but it's probably too early to declare victory, I'm afraid. We just have to hope this isn't some sort of ongoing problem... I'll keep my eye on it, but I might occasionally need the eye for other things, like scaring houseguests and such.

We seem to have suffered a number of outages this weekend, including one just a few minutes ago - but I still don't have a definitive answer as to why they've been occurring, I'm afraid.

It's possible we were attacked by a botnet, or spammers, or Republicans - something of that nature, but I don't think so. I'm not seeing the usual signs of that sort of thing on the back-end or in the database - mind you, I'm not a professional web security expert, but I've played one on TV a few times. Unfortunately, we're on cheap/shared/third-party hosting here, so people could be attacking any number of sites that are using the same servers as us, and we'd have no way of knowing.

I'll see what I can find out tomorrow, but I expect it will probably end up being something pretty mundane.

...and another outage just last night, with unfortunate timing for me, as I was... well, let's just say "indisposed." Sorry about that!

@$#%&!! database servers.

... and on top of that I fudged a setting that prevented regular members ("Contributors") from posting for about 45 minutes this afternoon. Sorry. Fixed now.