Full Length Damage Report

Source of artwork is from Mr.Wokada.

Hey peeps, Kyro here.
About a month ago or two, I promised to write a damage report on the database after it spent about a year or so being down. Well just to get it out there, the reason as to why it took so long to publish is because I was procrastinating. Also, I was racking my brain trying to figure out as to how I should deliver the information. I figured out I should give it as concise and simple as possible, but that’s proven to be quite a herculean task for me to achieve. Besides, little or more text, matter not if one have no interest in reading the article. So, I am willing to bet I will still have to answer stuff in PMs and Emails. Whatever I’ll just write the report as I please. I will still relinquish a few details here and there though.

First of all, we went back to Oct 2016’s version of the database. That’s the last backed-up version of the database. That means all entries uploaded afterwards were gone and we had to spend a fortnight or so uploading them. That already happened so it doesn’t really need much elaboration. We just uploaded whatever’s on our backlog back to the database.

Also, the rollback means all of the images on the database are gone. Every single one of it. This is due to fact that we moved the database’s host a couple of times. It was first hosted at -undisclosed webhost-. After that we moved it to our previous webmaster’s local. That movement was done flawlessly and the database retained most, if not all, of its assets. After that, we moved to another webhost which is our current webhost. This movement was flawed and troubled as it was not expected. We were suppose to assume the new database and start out fresh. But instead, we had to revert to the old database and push back any notion of upgrade away. Due to this unexpected development, we didn’t backed any of the graphics up and they are all gone now. That’s what we did for the fortnight before we let the database open to public, by the way. The DBteam had to manually restore all of the images for albums. All 4621 of ‘em. Also, no the back-up we made for the database doesn’t include any of the images. That backup also doubled as a super-efficient version of the database that has all of its entries in one uh, page.

Beside that, all user accounts made on the database has been purged. They were deleted, all six millions of them. This was done out of necessity due to the enormous amount of data required to house all of the bot users. And then there’s the issue with the automated system that was used to delete the bot users. The automated process was not made to handle the deletion of over 5 million or so user entries at once. This hindered the process of restoration and sorting them out individually would take an unreasonable amount of time. So we essentially decided to just delete all them. Apologies if any of you are somewhat attached to your old profiles. Yes, I do realise the irony of being called Hitler is even stronger now.

Additionally, we also disabled the usual way of signing up a new account. This is implemented to prevent any more bot users for making any spam accounts. Unfortunately, this also means no one else can make new accounts, at least not without administrators’ input. We can make new accounts, I just don’t see the reason as to why we would. You could access most, if not all of our services without needing an account. Not to mention the workload of manually registering new users every so often. But, I’m still open for any persuasion that the users might have. If you’d like to try to change my mind on allowing users having accounts, please go to “Contact Us”, choose “other”, and put in your remark. Who knows? Maybe a different perspective on things is all I need.

Lastly, loss of manpower and trust. This whole “MDB is down for the upgrade” debacle took us almost a year to pull through. Some of us were tired of waiting and decided to move on. Others had to be retired due to undisclosed reasons. At the start of this, our numbers peak at fourty or so staff members. Now our numbers dwindled to as little as fifteen. The number of the staff members will most likely remain low as I refuse to accept any new hands at the time. We also lost a good number of outside contacts due to our *apparent lack of reliability* as some would put it.

Well there you go, the amount of damage done on the database. You can’t exactly put the finger down on one person for this. It’s a complete train-wreck, a hurricane of issues piled up on one another by different people including myself. Some of these issues came voluntarily while others were completely unexpected. While it is important to learn from the past and remember them, it’s bad if we dwell on them for too long. Now it’s time to improve and expand the database. I for one, know our search engine is rubbish and a lot of features look like they are in alpha state. We are lacking also an “about us” page for the current generation. Stick around, folks. We’ll get ’em down soon enough.