Many of you noticed a lot of errors flying around early yesterday.. then the entire system completely down for the rest of the day. We had a hard disk crash on the server that caused all of that. I believe all is back up to normal.. no data was lost. If you recieve any error messages from this point forward, please notify me.

Thanks to those who alerted me of the problem via email and via the Software Update post.

PaulC

i was wondering what was wrong i tryed like 50 times to get to the website..owell alls good now

Well.. Looks like I spoke too soon. There was some data corruption that was not recovered with the backup. About a dozen threads sprinkled through out the entire board were affected with garbage characters. I had to delete those threads. Sorry for the inconvenience. If anyone finds a thread with strange characters or members who's status says "unregistered", please point me to it. I think I have caught all the instances. Seems to have hit threads occuring around the new year hours.

I will probably have to bring the board down for a short while later this afternoon to run a full diagnostic to ensure there are no other hidden issue.

PaulC

Ok, I've performed the system mantenance that I needed to do. I think all is running well again. There was data affected, mostly posts from the 30th to the 1st, but some prior to that. In the big scheme of things, not many files affected at all.

Please let me know if you experience any bugs, quirks or strange characters while you browse through the site.

Maybe it was just my computer, but I had a really hard time trying to the site.

Thanks for watching out for us Paul, again your dedication to this community amazes me. thanks again

seems 2 be doin pretty good now

paul, something else is up... today i was on the site and all of a sudden all these mcss popups came up and wanted me to download something from mcss.com

You won't find any pop-up from MonteCarloSS.com. I can say that with certainty. Neither the website, or our host server has ANY pop-up ads. You will see a security pop-up if you use the Chat Java Gateway on the site. That's it. If you have pop-ups while visiting MonteCarloSS.com, your computer has been "infected" by an ad slug parasite (my term).. probably Gator.com's slug. If you continue to have this problem.. contact me off board and I can tell you how to investigage your system to try and find these parasite programs.

I ran into this last year.. I inadvertently clicked "yes" on one of those pop-up's when you visit a site. At the time, nothing appeared to happen.. I learned later that Gator.com (DON'T GO THERE!) installed a parasite program on my system as a result that monitored my movements on the net.. then gave me random pop-up ads of what it thought I would most likely want based on that. I knew something wasn't right when I started seeing pop-ups on my own site! It was difficult to remove.. but I did it manually.

Paul, I have noticed that edited posts do not give the little note at the bottom stating that it has been edited. I know this because I have edited some of my posts (bad habit of not previewing posts), and this little note does not seem to show up anymore. Not a big deal, but I thought I would mention it...

paul it hasnt happend since i'll let you know if it happens again.

Ok Rob.. thanks.

Kevin.. Very observant! You win the prize! hehe. Actually.. that's a new "feature". With the new version of the software, I have it set so that you have 15 minutes from the original post to edit without that "Message has been edited" message comeing up. This allows you to catch some gramatical and spelling errrosr (who maeks thoses?) shortly after you post. Anything after 15 minutes, you can still edit.. but the note comes up saying it's been edited.

I can change the amount of time.. but figured 15 minutes was reasonable. There is also a feature that disables the ability to edit a post after a selectable amount of time. I've chosen not to turn this feature on.. thereby allowing a member to edit their posts indefinitely. But the feature is there if needed.

Anyway.. you get the prize for noticing. It allowed me to explain it!

cool. that will come in handy due to the fact I am notorious for editing posts for spelling mistakes/typos and/or info I thought of a minute too late. Thanks for the explanation