What was your biggest forum-related blunder?

One fine day I decided to do some serious updating of a forum/directory site, adding about 90 links to the directory, plugins to the forum, deleting the old no longer used copy of phpbb... and then I realized I had installed the directory to the same database as the phpbb I just deleted. At the time I had no recent backup and had to ask my host to restore the database. Unfortunately, their backup had been taken before I did all that work, so I had to redo everything.

 

Changed permissions so all the hidden forums could be seen. Not good.

 

Oh man, the fallout from that must have been terrible...

 

Actually not too bad, we are a boring bunch.

Sponsors addresses & how far they paid in advance type stuff. There were a few threads regarding favorite adult beverages.


A section regarding the relative merits of how often to back up the database, I have the geeks in a special group to help on those things that can see that stuff and not bother the normal people.

 

Being new to the whole vBulletin scene (after about 8 years of running small phpbb boards) I was looking around vbulletin.org and other sites for some addons to improve my sports related websites.

After about three hours of template changes, mod/hack installing, and permission set ups, i had changed the settings on one thing and everyone could see the admin section where we talked about potential bannings, warnings, infractions, what we were going to change, passwords to some hidden boards (which had become public) and so on.

It took about two hours to realise the mistake and fair enough I had to go through and change passwords for those forums that people had bookmarked etc and yeah had alot of explaining to do to members and co.

 

I ran a forum for over two years without ever having a single backup.

 

I once deleted the forum's root directory - luckily, I had a backup.

 

Made my forum go offline for quite a bit~ Lol, by mistake.

 

I accidentally a whole forum. Is this dangerous?

I have no idea what the hell I did, but every single post showed up as if it was by me, everyone had my permissions, everyone could edit my posts. Ah yes, and "unregistered" showed up under who's online with a uid of zero.
They called it "DarknessChan". It was funny about 3 days after I fixed it by restoring a backup.

 

That sounds like it was absolutely horrible. :frown:

 

Yep, I've done that a few times. I've run queries without thinking about how intensive they would be and then watched my server loads go up and up and up.... but, at least I know the server won't crash when it reaches a load of 450.

 

Baffling. I've never heard of a glitch quite like that.

 

I blame some hacker.

 

Kevinl, there was no one who could run the site for you while you were away? Sorry that happened to you, I hope it recovers eventually.

 

Ugh, sorry to hear about that, Kevin.

 

Yeah, Kevin that's a real bummer. I would be devastated if that happened. As you said though, you live and learn.

 

Waiting to long to ban a troll, took some time to recover the atmosphere..