Fallen London Wiki:July 2023 Downtime

From Fallen London Wiki (Staging)

What happened?[edit]

On July 23, 2023, at around 10:47 AM UTC, a hard drive failure at the server hosting provider caused the wiki to go down.

Over the last two days, I've worked to try to recover as much data as possible. Unfortunately, too much data was lost to be able to do a clean restore.

I ended up having to restore from an older, less optimal backup.

Where are we now?[edit]

The wiki is back up and running. though it will be in a precarious or inconsistent state for the next few days. Notably, categories, effects, and icons will take a while to repopulate.

The wiki has history until May 2022, and content until March 2023.

World qualities are not being updated, but fixing that is both feasible and high priority.

Search has fallen back to default MediaWiki search, requiring the page title to be known. Restoring search will be done in the next few days. Search has been restored.

Comment data has been preserved, but the data that links comments to wiki pages has been lost.

The Mask of the Rose wiki is completely lost for now.

What's going on with accounts[edit]

I was able to preserve account usernames from November 2022, but preferences, groups, and password data have not yet been recovered.

If you created your account after that date, you should be able to recreate it with no issues. (There might be an edge case relating to accounts created between November 2022 and March 2023). If you migrated your account from Fandom and kept your username, you should be able to login with your Fandom credentials (like you did when we first migrated).

The majority of users' passwords should be restored now; anyone who hasn't already gotten a password from me or synced their password with Fandom should be able to log in using their old password.

If you're still unable to login, then your record in the user table was most likely irrecoverably lost to the disk failure.

There are a few users who had multiple password entries, likely due to having accounts with the same username and different passwords between different wikis (live/dev/staging FL wiki, Mask of the Rose wiki) - I chose one of the entries, likely the FL wiki entry, but I have no way of knowing for certain. Those users are as follows:

  • Vercurio
  • Derp
  • Jaggedscar
  • Selerik (I sorted it ~ Selerik)
  • TheUnifel
  • Rahv7
  • Kitora
  • Sprightlyoaf
  • AndaisQ
  • Asarta
  • CrowApples
  • Vainfire
  • Storm
  • Rostygold
  • TFF
  • Phaeron
  • Chaoyi Wang

If you're in the above list, your password may have changed to the password for another wiki that was on the same server (hopefully not).

In any case, if you are still unable to login or create your account, but you know the username and email address, contact me on Discord (alan.huang) or email (wiki@fallenlondon.wiki) and I can reset the password. (Discord is preferred and will get a faster response) Do not try using the password reset function; it won't work because there's still no record of emails in the database yet. Verification is based on emails sent in the past and stored on the mailserver, which is separate.

If I'm able to recover more data from the failed disk, I'll restore preferences and passwords (done) if possible. This should be nondisruptive.

Next steps[edit]

Over the next few days and weeks, I'll be actively working to see whether more data can be recovered from the failed disk.

I assume that editors will be actively working to restore the wiki to a state close to where it was before the crash. Do not wait for me to recover more data.

The wiki should be stable for Estival. If I'm able to recover more data, I'll plan to apply that to the wiki. This will likely involve completely restructuring the database. I'll do my best to preserve any new changes made between now and then if I'm able to recover data.

Alan (talk) 21:20, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Addendum: Over the last days, Alan has stated on the Discord server that recovery efforts would mainly continue after Estival. --RagCall (talk) 12:02, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Places to start[edit]

What needs doing[edit]

Where to recover data[edit]

  • Wayback Machine - type in the URL of the page you are trying to recover
    • you may also be able to get to the wiki code by adding a /edit, although sometimes it may be from an older version of the article
    • there is also an aggregated zip archive of that available on the Discord
  • Google Cache may also have an older version of some pages saved. To view google cache pages, attach cache: to the beginning of the url (thanks to Bitt2 on Discord). If that doesn't work, add http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache: instead
  • finally, the game of course. If you want, you can also try recording "secret" data like IDs, but it is not necessary.
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