Database restoration

[DJ_Omnimaga]

As you remember, one month ago, the forum database, as well as all backups, got corrupted during a board upgrade. We have never found the reason why this happened and the backup corruption directly on my own computer remains a mystery. I believe the site and my computer might have either been hacked or hit by a virus, but it could be a bug in SMF installation software as well.

Unfortunately, the restoration is still incomplete, as there are still some internal bugs that needs to be resolved before putting it back online. Also, this backup is from March 2009. The good news about this is that we're back to SMF 1.1.x, but the bad news is that all posts made after March 3rd were lost, as well as all member accounts, posts, private messages and personal settings. Several features also have been lost, since we are not planning to upgrade to 2.0 again, until SimpleMachines Team drops support for 1.1.x serie, like PHPBB did in 2008 with PHPBB2. For now, moderator settings has been set back to how they were before the crash, meaning JCW, Pillagemyvillage, Quade77 and Fear 2 Stop as moderators. Ban list was restored as well.

While the topics made after March 3rd are all gone, all songs posted after this date, except for Audioghost's and Bass Launch's, are still intact, in some forms, though. When the site will totally be fixed and reopened to public (hoping another crash won't occur), a new topic will be made in the music showcase section which will list all songs uploaded on the site. These files will not have any extension, due to how file attachments are stored on SMF and IPB, so you will need to save the file as mp3 on your computer. Also, they have very weird names, so you might have an hard time finding your own songs. Fortunately, all attachments starts with a number, which might help you figure out which ones are more recent and which ones aren't.

We do not know if the Original TIMGUL will ever recover from this database failure incident, as it has been so long since the site was down and since over 3 months of posts and songs were lost, not to mention there is another MTVMG site now at http://timgul.freeforums.org  (altough it isn't really a MTVMG-Only site, like The International Music Generator Users Lounge. It is more of a general music site with a MTVMG section with an userbase that is very open to MTVMG series). Hopefully maybe the community will slowly rebuild again and the site will retrieve the activity it used to have a month ago (and most of the members).

Many thanks to Netham45 (former administrator at http://www.omnimaga.org) for having managed to fix the forum database, something I've been trying to do in vain.