DDR, seeing as you’re a known member, I have already granted you author rights, which means you can post directly without approval from an editor. Welcome to the journals team!

For everyone else, quickly check out the interview with the one and only Eric S. Raymond!

As our benevolent admins have posted.

In the crash right before the move some data was lost. We had to restore and old backup of the database. Due to this is all new forum accounts, forum posts and probably the attachments from the last two month were lost in the crash. Forum avatars have to be reuploaded since some problems with those occurred, too. The good news is that this is probably everything that was lost.

So if you can’t login or anything, now you know why.

Gogogogo!

…and also on the fact that I’m getting a white page instead of the classic “experiencing technical difficulties” message

UPDATE: The basic forum system seems to be up (with an interesting message “breaking stuff”). I’m guessing that they are now restoring the database.

The Fora are, unfortunately, still down.

UPDATE: “Create” is working as well. Just clear your cache.

To this end, I thought I’d propose an alternative solution. The Gallery.

Currently the Journals and the Gallery are setup in such a way so as to allow people to easily register and have their own personal space to post their artwork. Every new user registering gets automatically their own album in which they can upload as many images as they like, including videos or other media files.

The gallery also supports many other functions like commenting, ratings, RSS, tagging etc, which can greatly enhance the content. A Quick example is the Art of Wesnoth, which is a custom tag I’ve created to showcase some of the best content that already exists.

How can this help in development? Well, first of all, you can use it, while the fora are down

However I think that this is more powerful than the fora. In the gallery, artwork designers have their own public sandbox where each piece of art acts like a different thread without clutteting (as would happen in the forum). This way the discussion can move from “thread” to “thread” fluidly and more organised. You can see a short example I did here. (Please disregard “content” of the example).

Furthermore, because by uploading to the gallery you have automatic classification, there is no more reason for bots or hacks in order to somehow grab the artwork before it is lost (as is what was required with the graphic library). Uploaders can tag their art as soon as they put it up which will then make it searchable. Edits from other devs will not be confused with actual artwork. People can subscribe to their favorite artist through RSS to get immediate updates and then collaborate etc.

As a last small bonus, anyone can use the artwork in the gallery for a  blogpot.

Generally, I feel that there’s a lot of potential in using the gallery software for this. Here is an opportunity to see if it is as useful for you, as I think, while allowing you to continue with your contributions. I can only hope that people like it enough to consider taking it on officially as part of the wesnoth project.

Give it a go and see what you think. You’ve got nothing to lose.

Full quote follows:

As you might have noticed we are currently enduring some problems with our main server. That is: about one week ago we had a major harddrive failure resulting in the system not working at all. So far we don’t know exactly how much of the data on the system is completely lost since we are working on restoring things. So far the multiplayer servers (stable and development) are back up again and the subdomain redirects like gettext.wesnoth.org are working again. What is not working so far are the forums and the wiki. The problem is that parts of the database seem to be broken. Currently cycholka is trying to fix and restore whatever is possible. Some stuff is completely lost like the screenshots folder we were using including the ancient screenshots. If anyone of you has a backup of those, feel free to contact us. We don’t know how many of the forum attachments are broken but it is likely that some will not be restoreable.

We hope to have the wiki and forums usable again in some days but we don’t know how long it will take. We will soon migrate the main server to a different machine anyway. This one will offer more network bandwidth and due to this make the website feel smooth again. We are not 100% sure if we will restore the wiki and forum completely before the move, so it might be that you are on the new server when the forum and wiki are up again…

I will try to post updates every now and then and please keep in mind that asking “when will the forum be up again” in our IRC chans won’t speed things up at all. So please stay patient and play Wesnoth instead of using the forums. If you are interested in some more info, have a look at the (unofficial) Wesnoth Journals.

Yay! The Journals are linked from the main page

So things are looking good. We may not have access to fora or wiki but it should be coming back soon. It is unfortunate that screenshots and attachments might be lost and that it happened before I managed to copy them all to the gallery.

However if people are looking for a place to continue with artwork development you can easily use the gallery for that purpose. I’ll blog about it in more detail soon but in short, it provides personal albums for all registered users, bbcode commenting along with ratings and the like. You should be quite capable to collaborate from there until the forums are back up.

So, it seems the restoration of services is slowly limping back to working order. At the time of writing, the official website homepage seems to be up but nothing else (forum, wiki etc) which leads me to believe it’s mostly a static html page. You can’t do anything more than look at the great image of some bearded dude but why would you want to stop staring at such great artwork anyway?

Funniness aside, we’re getting somewhere it seems. Stay tuned.

Personally, I think it’s a trap. Large fonts? Bold? You know it…

Seriously though this is progress, even if small. It means that the web server has been somewhat repaired and hopefully soon the backup will be restored in place.

Lets wait and see.

Currently it will allow you to put you own alias but not the password (if you need this capability just tell me)

So now, whenever any other meltdown occurs you can get the gist straight from the horses mouth. Just make sure to pay attention to the topic and you don’t ask the same questions again and again .