I don’t know why but I kinda want to know what ‘Boo!’ Forum was about.
It was a dedicated Halloween forum that was used in 2011, if I recall correctly. The forum was closed to new posts in November of that year. I think the original plan was to open it every year for Halloween, but people complained about having a dead forum (heh, ironic for a Halloween forum) on the main page forum list. In 2012 the Boo! forum was permanently closed and all of its posts were moved into other forums.
You didn’t ask, but the Barn House forum was dedicated to Ed Zotti’s book by the same name. This forum was later removed due to a lack of posting activity.
TubaDiva already explained what Straight Dope Chicago was.
The posts that were made during the Winter of Our Missed Content (December 7, 2001 until March 10, 2002) are gone forever. Posts made before then were not lost (see below). There are some posts and some user names and attributions that are pretty well hosed or missing that were earlier, but that was caused by a change in software, not by the Winter of Our Missed Content.
The Winter of Our Missed Content was caused by a malicious software attack that took the board down in early 2002. There is an old saying that you never really know how well your backup systems work until you are forced to use them. It turns out that our backup system had some issues.
We had a full system backup, but it was several months old, so we had all of the older posts, but not the latest posts. We had some incremental backups later than that, but there were issues with those and some posts got lost permanently. Restoring the board was a slow process that started with restoring the full system backup and then applying the incremental backups one at a time while trying to sort out the mess of missing data.
They also made a bunch of software changes and security changes, which added to the down-time.
Some threads from that time survived on archives like the Wayback Machine. But it’s hit-and-miss to find any of them.
IIRC we did “Boo!” for at least a couple of years. It would appear just before Halloween and then vanish after Halloween; it was never meant to be a full time forum, just some Halloween fun.
We had some other stuff too, over the years, things that didn’t work or stuff that was merged into other stuff … I’ve forgotten a lot of it. Seeing that list was helpful; i hadn’t looked at that in years.
Should also mention for those of you searching for all your posts that the system only serves them up like 500 at a time, so you can’t see all of them in one gulp.
How all the early posts got the names sheared off: We were originally on another message board system (MyBB? Something like that.) And after a while it proved to just be too small for our needs and we moved up to vBulletin. The archives from the old board were brought to vB, but they didn’t transfer correctly. There was no way to do it over again, so we were stuck with what we had.
How “The Winter of Our Missed Content” happened: We had a hiccup in the backup. Every night the system takes a little break and backs everything up. We had run out of server space and didn’t realize it. So every night that the system backed up it would go from the posts most recently made to whatever the server could handle, so each night as it backed up it ate posts from the recent past. By the time we caught it there were a considerable amount of history lost in the ether. We were not able to recover any of the lost data.
IIRC we also got a somewhat bigger server when the board came back up, so that also added some more recovery time to the outage.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
I believe the old board software was UBB, not that it matters.
The new server was going to be much faster than the first one.
It’s taking longer than we thought. 