astral posted:

Everyone, thank you again for bearing with us during the various site maintenances of the last week or so. You might not be surprised to learn that there were some missing pieces in SA's infrastructure. Perhaps most appallingly among those, there had not been a database replica server running for several years. Further, if the site had a backup process in place before, it must have lived on that missing replica; there did not seem to be anything configured. You read that correctly—for many years, these forums were one malformed shell command, bad SQL query, or hardware failure away from vanishing in a puff of magic smoke.