by Eric » Wed Sep 05, 2012 4:17 pm
*walks into an empty room, bare floors, blank walls, a janky piece of plywood held up on two sawhorses pretending to be a bar, and a creaky lonely chair in the middle of the room*
Sigh
*heads to the chair & sits down*
This, my friends, is the sorry tale of how, while battling the hordes of spammers, I killed a popular thread. Oh, I assure you, it wasn't done out of malice, but, bleary-eyed and dust-encrusted, I returned home to find our beloved board buried under an assault of spammers. I was tired, I was hungry, I was stupid. Emphasis on stupid. I decided to start fighting when I should have waited until I was rested, but I was the first mod back & the board was unusable.
*looks around the emptiness*
I made some coffee and entered the battle Sunday night, knowing that I could only remove posts but not block the spammers, but determined to try to get some breathing room. I started hacking and whacking, chipping away post by post for over an hour, and when I realized quite a lot of them were complete spammer topics I knew I could take out 20 or 30 at a time, instead of one by one. I attacked, I was knocking out the bastards by the handful...
and then I fucked up royally.
It was a wall of spam posts in "Open Topics", a long row, some marked as spam, some not. I was checking the boxes & trying to make sure I was only getting "zero follow-up post" while comparing the last post to known spammers when I checked the Bar 3, since the last post was a spammer, and somehow between cross-eyed & stupid I didn't notice the thousands of posts, and I didn't even realize I'd checked it until after I said "yes", delete topics...
I screamed loud enough my upstairs neighbor called to make sure I was okay.
It's unrecoverable. Gone. I've checked, but there's no way to recover a single thread.
I even checked the "wayback machine" to see if I could find any of it. It doesn't look like it's there either.
I am unbelievably sorry, and was so frozen by what I'd done it took me until Tuesday to even start going after the spam again - I seriously didn't want to fuck up more. I made it through over 8 hours of spam-whacking fine the last two days, so there's that at least.
Hopefully this empty space will get some love, and some of the memories created in Bar #3 can live on.
*sets up a round of drinks on the saw-horse bar, waits*