About a year ago, the Cemetech website was hacked. I had a database backup which had ironically been taken a few days earlier for a completely different reason, and it appeared to be complete. Once the database was restored however, I found to my chagrin that one critical piece was missing: the post text for 7,783 of our posts, posts number 1060 through 8843. The rest of the data was there: authors, timestamps, polls, etc. Even the search tables were in fact, and it was these that led me to my solution. PhpBB indexes its search by two tables: one containing a list of keywords with associated ID numbers, and another listing word ids and post ids. By matching them up, I was able to reconstruct the gist of the missing posts. All of the nontrivial words from the original posts are now there, though not in order since the search database does not store that information. Say goodbye to pages of "this topic cannot be found," and enjoy searching through some of the old, no-longer-lost posts and topics.

yay, this is good. If anything in General Open Topic is wanted to be back opened, please let me know.

Aye, I might even go through at some point and correct some of the posts to be more coherent.

Perhaps we should post some old gems here?

Ah, I think this was a thread in which I introduced myself: http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=97. I'm afraid the reconstructed posts aren't terribly coherent, but you can get the gist. Plus they are humorous without verbs/articles/prepositions!

This one's also funny: me talking to myself three times in gibberish, with no one else around: http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=92

They may not be coherent, but I'll finally be able to read a lot of topics I've wanted to read for a long time.

true, if only we could get them readable agan, oh well. I think this will increase a lot of word counts also.

You mods and admins are welcome to go through the posts in your forums and edit them to make more sense...

ah this just proves that Kerm is god
a god @ coding that is (for any of u real religious ppl, not that theirs anything worng w/ that)

it also shows you how important it is to back up your files regularly

Heh, thanks. But see, I did have a backup! For some obscure reason, when creating the backup, phpMyAdmin decided to omit 7000 of the posts, just for fun. Unfortunately, it wasn't / isn't so fun for me.

It probably did it because the backup size was too big... I think that's a possibility...

could be, who really know though.

Huh, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I've been doing regular verified backups since then give or take a few days, so hopefully nothing like that will happen again in the forseeable future.