Where have the archives gone?

[werewolfsfan]

What's up at www.sugarquill.net? All my bookmarks are broken and I basically can't see anything but the home page and the closed forums pages. Please, please don't say all those stories and art are lost! Oh, no!

Comments

[zsenya]

Hey all. I don't check my old messages very often anymore. I don't actually know what is going on. The whole site is PHP driven, and it is possible that our web host did something to make certain functions of the site not work. I can look into it, but am somewhat out of my league with this, so if anyone knows anyone with some PHP and mySQL skills, that would be great (you can just reply here)

[snorkackcatcher]

Sorry, should have replied to your comment directly -- see comment on OP below.

[ex_jo_blogs]

Just to add a bit of info - the archive seems to be online again, but I've noticed that only the first page of reviews are showing up. When you click on 'next page' it takes you to the same page.

Also, there is what appears to be spam on the first page of After the End's reviews. Someone suggested it could be a possibility that spam has made the DB too big and broken it...?

[snorkackcatcher]

Possible depending on the amount of disk space available, but it would have to be a really large quantity of spam to fill up the database. I just tried to use the search function to find AtE and it came back 'Invalid type' which suggests something more fundamental has changed -- possibly due to a PHP or MySQL upgrade? When I clicked on the next/previous buttons they worked, so maybe that was a temporary glitch.

[zsenya]

p.s. The stories and art are not lost. I have copies. And they are actually online, we just can't get to them via the web because of the way the server is configured. So they can be restored... somehow... by someone smarter than I am...

[werewolfsfan]

Thanks for answering! I'm relieved to know that they aren't entirely lost. Even in my measly 2 years in the HP fandom, I've seen several archives close, with little or no warning, taking with them fanworks not available anywhere else.

[sea_thoughts]

Hi Zsenya, Starsea here, that makes me feel a little better, thanks for responding.

[vegablack62]

Yes, thank you for responding and for your work creating and maintaining the archive.

[snorkackcatcher]

Er, reposting what I posted on jo_blogs:

I do have skills in PHP/MySQL, but I'm not sure I have the time to debug a codebase I've never seen before and would be coming to cold. It depends how complicated it is and what has suddenly changed -- it might be something very simple, or it might be something thoroughly obscure that requires a broad knowledge of the way the system is set up to fix (which the person(s) who originally wrote the code would be best placed to do in that case). So I'd be willing to at least take a look if that's any good, but absolutely no guarantees of results -- although I suspect that others with more time available will be able to come forward anyway.

[megan29]

Same as snorkackcatcher: I have the skills, but not much time. After New Year's is when I could take a look - if it doesn't get fixed by then. Zsenya, if you want me to try my hand at it, please email me at megajo29@gmail.com after the new year, and let me know.

[alkari]

I don't know what kind person / people fixed it, but things are working again now, so many thanks to the Good Samaritans.