Thanks for letting us know what’s going on. Or trying to anyway – I myself don’t speak geek. 
It’s nice to be kept in the loop, even when you don’t understand a word of the explanation. But I get the gist: the hamsters are getting cranky.
Thanks, Jerry. 
I’m not. Sorry. This isn’t directed at you Jerry, I appreciate the job you do keeping the board running. However, as paying customers we shouldn’t have to beg for information about the unavailability of a product. The PTB should have an iota of common sense about customer service and the very first post after an outage should be a brief non-techie explanation about what happened.
Just my .02 as someone who is held accountable to customers every day.
I’ll do my best to provide a non-technical analogy.
You recall the “Defence Against the Dark Arts” courses from the Harry Potter books? Database administration (among other technical troubleshooting disciplines) is one of those dark arts.
Thanks very much, Jerry, for your work for this board.
As a poster here, and a user, I also thank Jerry for answering. While little comfort, at least we know they’re working on it.
Could someone put this into non-geek speak?
Why continuous database corruption? What does that involve, software or hardware or both? What does “new infrastructure” mean? A new server? Other? And so on.
Apparently it means that searching is disabled for the nonce. 
The board disables searching for child molesters?
Scratches head
Looks up definition of nonce on dictionary.com
Scratches head again
In a momentary burst of insight, looks up nonce on urbandictionary.com
Ohhhhhh. 'Kay, for my previous post, replace nonce with moment. Everyone cool with that?
Damn Brits messing around with our language!
Now, I’m no SQL expert, but “the database goes corrupt on a regular basis; usually I just have to take it offline for 15 minutes to fix it” sounds like a kludge to me. If you can’t fix it, why didn’t you just bring on a LAMP consultant to take a look at it a year or two ago? Are MySQL databases really supposed to just require taking offline for 15 minutes every day or two (“increasing in frequency”, no kidding!)? Somehow I doubt it, considering how common the LAMP configuration is on the Web and how uncommon this “Down for 15 minutes to solve a database corruption issue” thing is. It doesn’t make me feel very good to know that, while I pictured a guy in a polo shirt and khakis hunched over a keyboard and hacking at the database frantically, the real picture seems to be more like a guy in a T-shirt and jeans leaning back in his chair, stretching, yawning, and checking his watch.
Has it ever occured to you (and the others who complain) that this is precisely the sort of post that discourages Jerry from bothering to say anything?
While I’m on it, has it ever occurred to ANY of you complainers that you spend more in three visits to McDonald’s, where you get crappy food and no service at all, than you do for a year of posting here? That to get all upset and cranky and demanding over a product that costs you only $15 a year is, perhaps, just a weensy bit out of proportion???
Let’s assume that the powers that be are less than adept at running a message board. Let’s assume that the hardware isn’t up to snuff. Let’s take this ALL for granted.
You know what? It’s been bad like this since we left AOL. That’s TEN YEARS. So, by now, I’d think y’all would have cottoned on to the fact that it’s like this, it’s gonna BE like this, and if you don’t LIKE the fact it’s like this, DON’T PONY UP YOUR MONEY WHEN THE SUBSCRIPTIONS RUN OUT. :smack:
Otherwise, politely waiting to see what happens seems to be the proper behavior. I, personally, expect that Jerry is quite busy when things are wonky, and I’d rather that he be focused on fixing them than holding the hands of some cranky people.
Honestly. Some of you behave just like my high school students… :eek:
danceswithcats
Heck, it works for MicroSoft doesn’t it?
Seeing as my day job is Oracle and am using MySQL only for hobby purposes, I might be a bit off on this, but why are you still using MyISAM? Why not InnoDB? Not only is it more resistant to corruption but will also provide row level locking instead of table level like MyISAM. Given the apparently bad track record for MyISAM, I’d atleast try another engine for the tables that are usually found to get corrupted.
Not to burst your bubble, since you’re so happy to lump me in with “the others who complain”, but I’m normally one of the first ones to defend the staff. But treating Jerry as some sort of Technology God who is not to be questioned lest he stop gracing us with his presence is silly.
Jerry, I greatly appreciate you coming in and telling us what’s going on. You’re really good about that, and you’re one of the few people (in any field, really) who’s willing to admit fault. That’s huge. I wish more people did that. But the minimum of server administration knowledge I have tells me something is fishy here, and I’m asking you what the deal is because I know you tell it like it is and because this has piqued my curiosity, to put it mildly.
I don’t eat at McDonald’s. Wanna know why?
I’ve given that same speech plenty of times before. But this time, I have to wonder: what kind of bug is up your ass for this place that the moment someone asks the admin a technical question, you freak out and start having an epileptic seizure all over the thread? Get a fucking life.
Oh, I didn’t realize we were insulting people in ATMB now. Good to know.
Let me remind all combatants–I mean, all participants–we understand that these are difficult times and that tempers are inflamed, but insulting one another is not allowed in ATMB.
Please be civil to one another here. Take it to the Pit.
Being in the computer reliability business, I wonder if you keep reliability statistics. Useful statistics include uptime percent, number of outages, mean time between outages, and outage length. If you collect this, perhaps someone could post it. If not, maybe you can start after the current problems get fixed?
The stuff I work on aims for five nines reliability - that is 99.999% uptime. Clearly the Dope doesn’t need, and can’t afford, this, but I think we’re sitting around two nines now. This many problems indicates a systematic, not random, issue.
if the mySQL installation has support, have they been informed? If not, is there an issue that the hardware is not powerful enough to support the board?
No matter - given the history, uptime statistics would be very useful in determining how bad a problem is.
That was an insult in the same way that my cat is a lion.
Because there are other restaurants out there that give away even worse food for free!.
The message I’m getting here is very positive. We’ve apparently turned the corner but the next six months will be crucial.