is it just me, or is the forum flipping a shit?

first, i couldn't get on for like 3 hours today
then i opened the brace yourself topic and there was nothing there. it was just the header and the footer and nothing in between.
then i went to kd's bar and grill and there were like 45 pages missing, the last post was from march
and now as i am making this topic none of the clickable smileys are clickable, they are just lil red x's.

this, needless to say, is not workin out so good for me.
is anyone else having this problem??

It would appear to be the same invisionfree bug that wiped the entire forum a few years back. Most posts were deleted making it hard to respond for topics. If your topic that you made no longer exists (the posts inside it have been deleted) feel free to make a new one and the old one of the same name can get closed.

It took a bunch of the buttons as well. Happened on a hell of alot more forums Ive seen...

The forum disappearing for a mere few hours is no problem, something we can all get over and I think we can all survive without a daily dose of FFF, but when it goes as far as effecting the forum permanently that’s what sucks.

Any idea on what causes this glitch or if it has occurred on other IF forums? (Aza sorta answered the second part of that, but things went awry before I could post this up and didn't want to edit it)
Is there a way to back up the site at all?

I hate to see things get deleted and see the sites history simply disappear. Naturally we can carry on as usual and keep posting new material, but when parts of the forum evaporate like this it just sucks…and it hurts to see all of this time and effort put into FFF gone. Pretty much all of my topics from now back to April this year have been completely erased and even my fanfic FFFF remains damaged and incomplete.
Words can't descibe how much this sucks nor how pissed off I am right now. That's why I hate investing so much time and effort into things, just because I know the will all disapear in time, but to see them eradicated before me, that hurts even more, makes me not want to bother if the same thing is just going to happen again and I'm not just refering to the forum here. Sure something gets erased and life goes on, no shit, but it is quite a pisser and definately takes a toll on ones motivation. “That’s just how fast your life can change. In the blink the eye, every things erased”. BTW anyone so much as even thinking that I'm just being over dramatic and need to cheer up and simmer down can buy a vowel: g_ f_ck y__rself. I'm not in the f***ing mood for anything.

IF's most recent harddrive crashed, and because of it, alot of recent data was erased. The most affected boards were the z1 boards, which lost almost everything. The FFF should consider itself lucky that this is all we lost. As far as retrieving the data goes, I'm pretty sure IF can salvage it. The official annoucement is on the IF support board.

EDIT: And on a side note...my poor trivia died...

Sad... I had a feeling this would happen when the site wasn't working. Oh well, we survived last itme, we will this time.

Annoying... But there's not really alot we can do. At least the forums didn't die completely! Lets just hope that IF can at least salvage some of the missing data/posts/whatever.

I think the thing that confused me most was the fact the forums said I had a new PM and the only ones in there were from March and earlier, I coulda sworn I deleted ones that old... Never mind!

Ya I got a letter from busta, that I got along time ago...
oh well

Bugger, big bugger. I think I'm cursed, this happend on the other forum I go too, although that was mainly due to that admin being a twat, this though is tragic.

Some of the old threads are cached by Google e.g. which is deleted here. Other threads may be cached on Google if there is no way to get them restored.

That's a shame. I was wondering why it wasn't working yesterday..oh well.
We can definately all be thankful that nothing more was lost...but....that kinda sucks for IF eitherway.
EDIT: "this topic is missing posts. we are working to restore these parts."
Ohhhh, I get it now....

All...my...topics...I...made...

*tears begin to well up*

It's not like its that big a loss, Busta. I'm sure for every hundred of your topics deleted, 1000 are still left.

Yeah, I know. I guess that was my way of saying "ah man, that kinda sucks." Not knowign what could happen at any minute in cases like this and nto being able to do anything stinks; but hey, what can we do, right?

What happend to the pics...do you think someones doing this on purpose?

No its not done on purpose. Its a problem with invisionfree's servers. Uploads (some people's avatars as well as the pips and user group pictures) are all gone for now, as well as most posts. Its just a mess and we gotta hope that they can fix it up. If not, we just gotta reload everything up and hope that we'll be able to recover.

The forum should be back to normal with all material restored by the end of this month, give or take. The IF staff is quite optimistic that everything will be fully resorted, but it could just be a gimic to keep people happy.

Here's the most recent news about it:
"Over the past 3 days we have been working on keeping the data recovery process moving along. We expect to have additional updates every few days. The recovery process is expected to take 1-2 weeks.

We are increasingly confident that the remaining lost posts and uploads will be recovered.

While we are awaiting an update on the recovery, we will be going over and expanding our plans on the actual return of any recovered data. We hope to present at least two recovery options to the affected board owners. We want to give board administrators flexibility in choosing what will work best for their own community.

Thank you for your patience and we look forward to working with the affected boards."

Also:
"FAQ and Guide for Affected Boards

Should I post in a "broken" topic?
We recommend that you continue posting in a separate topic. Once the broken topic is recovered you can merge it with the new topic to make 1 topic again. However, you can post in a broken topic, especially if you just want to make a temporary post (for example, a link to the topic where the discussion is continued).

Can I move topics?
This is not recommended, though if you must you can.

My board's name changed. Can I change it back?
Yes, you should change it to the name you want to use.

Will PMs be restored?
Yes."

So basicaly if we leave things as they are for a couple weeks there shouldn't be any problems when and if things get restorted. In the mean time I suggest we simply refrain from posting in all pre-crisis topics. I'd like to think IF is right and given the 1-2 weeks things will be completely restored. Mainly because it keeps me happy, but either way I'll only accept the whole Soul Edge, not fragments.

Alright well time to just move on, and wait for the board to get restored. We need some topics made to post in though.