Over the past few days we've been experiencing some technical difficulties. Two in particular, which may or may not have been related.

First, Perl's ability to access the database was broken during a software update that my host performed on the server on Saturday night. Since then, many portions of the site have been out of order including the museum, collections, and the forum sidebar. The shop and the forum (with the exception of the sidebar) are still working because they are written in PHP rather than Perl.

Second, a chunk of the forum database went belly up inexplicably last night. This prevented access to the contents of forum messages, resulting in errors when users attempted to view threads and similar things here in the forum.

The second issue has been resolved (indeed, you couldn't load this message if the issue was still unresolved). Be warned that it's possible that some forum message data got lost or scrambled as a result of this issue. If you are concerned about this possibility, you may want to check if the last message (public or PM) you wrote/sent still exists.

As of right now, the first issue is still unresolved. My host appears to be working diligently on the problem, and it is certainly affecting any of their other clients that happen to use Perl with mySQL and share the same server as ours.

We'll know when it's working again because all the broken stuff will just automagically work again, most notably in the forum where the sidebar will suddenly reappear.

Sandy

Latest update:



Sandy

Received this message late last night (about 30 minutes after I went to bed), so I didn't read it until this morning:



This one came about an hour later:



So at this point, I loaded up the site HOPING it was still busted! HA! A virtual dedicated server (VDS) would have been a nice upgrade. No more instances of the host taking the site offline because my buggy scripts were slowing down his other customers.

Anyway, it looks fixed now, and that's good news too!

Sandy