The Narrow Path Ministries

Today I received an email from a brother who had previously been shut out by our forum disaster several months ago. He said he was able to log-in today, and he wondered if this forum had been fixed. I told him that I don't know, but if some of our other old users would be able to sign in, it just might mean we are back up and running.

This may have always been, but I've noticed if I'm typing something and it takes several minutes, I'll try to submit and have to log back in. After a few times of this, I've learned after typing to make a back-up copy of what I've written before I post.

Ron

No, it seems I still can't register as Troy C as I did before.

Rats!

Steve,
Why didn't you like www.theos.org ? Jarrod and I love your ministry and want to help where ever we can. We make our living everyday working on the Internet that involves a complete mastery of these technologies. The forum is setup and can handle far more load than TNP will ever need. If we could get a database dump of the old server we can import it into the new server - preserving all the existing forums.
Joel

Hi Joel,

I don't remember saying anything against www.theos.org. I do not understand anything at all about the internet, which is why I put out a request for any of our participants who might wish to do so to set up another forum. You are very welcome to set up for us an alternative forum, and I will try to get you any information you need (passwords, etc.) to transfer info from this forum to the new one.

Steve,
Oh... I didn't mean to imply that you had said something against www.theos.org. Sorry about that. When I saw the latest threads about the forum - I asked Jarrod and he said that he sent you a few emails and there was no reply related to his offering of help. We both suspected that maybe you didn't understand and just kinda let it go at that. However, if you can PM me the contact information for the current administrator we will work with him in what ever way is best.
--joel

Hi Joel,

Thanks for the offer. I will PM you that information.

I don't think I ever received Jarrod's emails. To tell the truth, I was thinking of you two when I put out the request, and would have been looking for such contact from you or him. Anyway, sometimes people tell me that they sent me emails which I never received. I don't know what happens to them. My personal email address is s_gregg7225@yahoo.com. Sometimes people accidentally send emails to our webmaster, which they intend for me (both email addresses are posted at our website). He usually forwards them to me, but maybe some of them get lost? Anyway, thanks for your offer. It would be great if you can help!

Jarrod and Joel, thrombomodulin and I have been discussing this very issue over the past couple of days. After meeting you at our home gathering I suggested to him you guys might be very helpful (a bit presumptive on my part, for sure). He is putting together a request to send the webmaster for an ascii dump of the database to see if we can resurrect and potentially re-host it.

Up until now, I was only aware of Darin's interest in actually carrying out the work of getting the forum fixed - So, I did initiate a private discussion with him a couple days ago.

The present problems I am aware of are:
1. Some users cannot log in and/or new accounts cannot be created.
2. Some posts are "missing' - there are omissions in the pages produced by viewtopic.php
3. Some posts/threads are not missing, but fail to appear in the page produced by viewforum.php.
4. automatic login does not work.
5. John has commented that spambot attacks have been a problem.

I am most concerned about fixing problems #2 and #3. These two problems are relatively recent, and Darin and I are not presently aware if:
1. The missing posts were permanently deleted from the database.
2. The posts are present, but perhaps fail to render because of some corruption of the users table.

Hopefully, the problem is of the second type and not the first because recovering these "missing" posts should be easy to accomplish.

However, even if the problem is of the second type a recovery of missing posts/threads will be possible if a backup copy of the database exists dating to before the deletions. If so, we should be able to merge the "missing" posts into the current version of the database. I have the computer skills and tools to be able to carry this out.

As a secondary interest I maintain a index of scripture references to the forum (see link below). If the forum changes in some way, then I will need to do some coding changes but this will not be any big problem to carry out.

The questions John will need to answer for us is:
1. Would he be willing to put an ASCII copy of the database on an FTP server for us to access (with passwords removed, especially if public)?
2. Could John look into what backup copies of the database or database files exist that might allow for missing posts to be retrieved if not otherwise possible?

I attempted to call John yesterday using the phone number on his website, but the number is apparently invalid.

I should also mention that merging and 'old' and 'new' version of the database to restore missing posts might have the detrimental effect of restoring posts the were intentionally deleted, but I think it will be worthwhile in order to restore what has been unintentionally removed.

Peter