Orvago, UO Stratics Forum Administrator & LotRO Stratics Associate Editor for Stratics Networks, has posted to UO Stratics that the Stratics Temporary Forums are online.  Here is a reprint of Orvago's post:

We have set up a set of Temporary Forums while we continuously work towards reviving the original forums.

I have a quick update regarding our downtime. As we've essentially been forced to pursue data recovery - which is a long process - we've set up temporary forums for our users.

These can be at: Temporary Stratics Forums. Users will unfortunately need to create new accounts. We will do our best to migrate posts made here to the old boards when they come back, but can't make any guarantees (i.e. what you post here may be lost from history). There is an announcement on the boards that details the reason for the downtime and also why we chose VBB for the temporary forums.

Michael "Gallahan" Buckwald
Executive Director
Stratics

Here is some information regarding the Temporary Forums and just what happened to our original forums, site, and database.

What's the deal with these forums?

These are temporary forums that we've put up so that communities across Stratics can continue without impediment while we work towards recovering the old forums. Again: if all goes well, these forums will be brought down in approximately five to seven days.

Why are these forums different?

We decided a while ago that VBulletin offered most of the features we custom built in to UBB out of the box - that would make it much easier for us to do things like forum upgrades, etc. We've been doing small alpha tests of VBB over the past month or so. In terms of this downtime specifically, VBB let us get these temporary forums set up and configured far faster than doing the same with UBB. Moreover, this will be a great opportunity for users to give us feedback on VBB and suggest features/customizations (keep in mind there are *many* "rough edges" here - our goal was to get these boards up ASAP).

What happened to the forums?

It's important to note that we take lots of precautions to prevent the loss of data. Stratics is hosted on five production servers. The forums sit on a brand new machine with eight SAS drives operating in a RAID configuration. In the unlikely event that machine loses enough drives for there to be data loss, we contract for both local daily backups as well as local backups to remote datacenters in New York and the mid-west. That's an eight drive RAID configuration with brand new SAS drives and three daily backups. In this case, our primary data center accidentally wiped the data off the forums server while trying to install a new operating system on a similar looking machine. At the same time, we discovered that the system administration firm we contracted with at the time had not performed any recent backups in spite of correspondence with us to the contrary.

Thus we were forced to send the machine out for data recovery by a leading firm. Unfortunately, the process is very slow. Thus these temporary forums.

Why are some forums missing?

Some forums were omitted for the sake of expediency in getting temporary boards up. No worries though - those forums that are missing will return.

I have a suggestions/comment/complaint - who can I contact?

Please feel free to contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Some one will reply within a few hours.

Once again, our sincerest apologies for what has transpired.

~Orvago,
LotRO Stratics Associate Editor
UO Stratics Forum Administrator

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