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1. There are PMs missing.
Contrary to what I first thought (I misinterpreted the email from the software vendor) it appears PMs were deleted when everyone's account was deleted.
When I restored the backup it restored peoples PMs (although they seem a little screwy) but only up to the backup date which was IIRC 24th April. Alas it appears any PMs sent since then are gone from the system here.
However if you are being notified of your PMs by email (which I think is the default) I'm pretty sure they include the text of the actual PM within the email (which is why I get so many misdirected responses via email to PMs) so assuming you haven't deleted them many of you will have your own backup of the PMs. *Note this does NOT include PMs you have sent. The person you sent them too should have the backup in that case (once again assuming they haven't deleted them)
My apologies about that. I realise this may cause some hassles for some people and I'll keep looking to see if there's a solution but I can't really see one turning up now.
The PM system is now available for use as usual. There shouldn't be ANY problems with the PM system going forward (i.e newly sent PMs from now).
2. Avatars and Sigs
These are gone. Just re-add them as you normally would.
3. Supporter Memberships
I'll be sorting these out this afternoon and restoring people to their former status. There *shouldn't* (and trust me I have every appendage crossed) be any problems going forward with renewals as if there's any subscription info missing I should be able to re-add it manually.
4. Renamed Accounts
There are a few people who have changed their display name, they should be able to log in as usual (try your "old" name is having trouble) but they may find that their old posts haven't been associated with their account. If this is the case please PM me and let me know and I'll go and associate your posts/PMs.
5. Anon system
The "anonymous" user was one of a casualties in the deletions and wasn't in the backup it appears. As such the system won't work as it's trying to post using an unknown user. This applies equally for anonymous replies to threads as it does for new anonymous posts. It's a relatively easy fix and hopefully I should get to it today but at the moment it's not at the top of my list.
6. New posts
Initially when you log back in and possibly even the first couple of times, you might have some strangeness from the post tracking system (tracking what you've read and what you haven't). This will clear itself up pretty quickly.
If you find yourself with NO POSTS to view. If you go to the front page of the forum (just click the NA logo) down the bottom of the list of sections you'll see a link for "Today's Active Content" or something similar. This is basically all the posts in teh last 24hrs. They will display to you regardless of whether you've read them or not. So if you want to go back and catch up or think you've missed something that should sort you out.
If on the other hand your problem lies in the opposite direction and you have TOO MANY POSTS, then going to the bottom of the front page once more will find you a link entitled "Mark Board (or forum) Read". This will mark ALL the posts on the forum read by you. If you use this then use the Today's active content link. You can pick and choose what to read and get back up to date pretty quickly, without a lot of the stuff the forum thinks you haven't read hanging around.
7. Deleted Accounts
As stated before if you created your account AFTER the 20-something of April then chances are you'll have to recreate it. If you try to log in and get told of a non-existent account then that's your proof. Just recreate your account (you can use the same username/password/email etc as previously and it won't be considered a duplicate account).
If you hadn't made any posts... what's stopping you.. Post away.
If you had made some posts under your old account then please PM me and let me know and I'll associate those posts with your new account.
Post Mortem
Alas this one's on me. I got slack. Well distracted is probably more accurate.
We used to have a system that automatically backed up the forum DB every "night". I'd been using basically the same system all over the place for ages but I'd never gotten around to fixing it so that it actually deleted OLD backups that were no longer needed. This meant that as you ladies are quite so prolific in your verbiage that the DB was a pretty decent size and backing it up every night was consuming space on the server. Some of you might remember a little while ago we had a couple of brief bouts of downtime and I put it down to the hard drive filling up because of the backups.
I made some changes at the time that prevented the server actually going down (I was getting notified before we completely ran out of space) but at the time didn't have a chance to actually fix the script so it worked properly. Fast forward to about 6 weeks ago and the notifications were getting far too frequent and so I stopped the backup process with the intention of fixing the script.... I'm sure you can put two and two together.
I'm still not 100% sure why the inactive member task decided to delete everyone but that's moot as I've disabled it for the time being. It should have been a moot point anyway as a simple restore of the DB backup should have had a losing no more than a days worth of posts, members and PMs. Of course to restore something you first need to have backed it up..... see above for details
So my apologies to all members, both old and new, that this has happened and will most likely inconvenience a few people somewhere along the line.
It happens, and it's a PITA for ALL concerned but aside from helping people work out how to route around the damage the best we can hope for is to learn from the screwup and make sure it doesn't happen again.
Guess what I'm doing tonight
soooo glad to have NA back though 
