BrokenFingernail.com

I’d like everyone to read the information about why IAM is down.

I cannot apologize enough for having to take IAM down without notice. Starting from Thursday morning, the order of events that we suddenly started seeing was that some of the CGI’s were being deleted from the server on a regular basis. We then put in place a mechanism to replace those CGIs when they were removed while investigating the behavior. Once that was in place, we noticed that something was deleting user profiles so we made the decision to turn off services and prevent further data loss while we investigate the matter. It seems that the act of disabling IIS has prevented further account deletions. We are still investigating the matter and require the site to be offline until we are able to pin point the cause of the data loss. Please remind everyone that we have a back up of the site from 9/19/2007 so any profiles that may have been affected will be restored.

As with any unscheduled downtime, we have always credited members with more than the outage period and there has NEVER been an instance where we did not credit members for an unscheduled outage.

As far as I am concerned, no personal information is to be released as it never should have been in the first place.

And here’s the update from ModBlog.

I believe we have figured out what the “deletions” were. They weren’t actual deletions. What would happen was that if you loaded a page, whatever was deleting the CGI file would basically make it so if you timed it properly, it looked like the page you were viewing had been deleted as it suddenly had a background but no information. We didn’t put two and two together until about two hours ago that it wasn’t a REAL deleted page because if you replaced one CGI file, the page was back.

We are still trying to determine what is causing the files to delete themselves but we believe we have figured it out. I am hoping that IAM will be turned back up on Sunday or Monday at the latest, with all users having access and with the current data from the day the site initially went offline.

PLEASE REMEMBER THAT YOUR DATA IS SAFE. We have TWO complete back ups. One from whenever the site originally was turned down and another from the migration on the 19th. No matter what is being said, you will get the opportunity to back up your photos and diaries as soon as the site is back up. I am doing everything I can to return IAM. My intention is to have IAM back up by Monday at the latest.

AGAIN, the files that are deleting themselves are not related to your data. Your photos, diary entries, IMs and everything else will be there just as if you’d never left them!

Rachel

Very sweet, really. So, I would assume that Jon, who’s post on ModBlog I found yesterday, was the one that put up the old IAM message? I know that no one really wants the personal to come into the light, but then why did everyone but Rachel herself post it in the first place? All the other parties did: Shannon and Jon.

In any case, they are trying their damnest to get everything back in working order and I, as well as the rest of the community, hope that this gets resolved quickly and fixed for good.