People Are Now Imitating Chickens

[Angela]

Hi,

You might have noticed that the Apronyms website has been down for about 17 hours. This was due to some maintenance work on the server. The site would have been back up by now, were it not for the fact that, around midnight local time, the server's hard disk was accidentally wiped. All the websites, all the setup, all the emails which were still on the server are gone.

I have backups of all of my websites, I think, so Apronyms will be back up fairly promptly, but spare a thought for my sister who edits hers directly on the server without keeping a local copy. She also uses IMAP which means all her email was on the server. Our only ray of hope is Google's cache, and that won't include the most important thing, the thing which we are gods to and yet worship: the code. Let's have a minute silence while somebody else learns the importance of backups the hard way.

Golly, that silence was so minute I hardly noticed it.

To quote the slightly customised version of Sophos Antivirus which is running on the computer I use at work: PLease run around in a panic waving your towel in the air. It won't fix the problem but it will make you feel better.

[Angela]

By the way, any apronyms submitted in the last 35 hours have been lost. Please submit them again when the server is back up.

On a completely unrelated topic, submissions to the global high scores for Brettrix over the last month or so (since I last got around to downloading them) have also been lost.

[Angela]

Well, much of the site is back up now... only at acronyms.co.nz now but I think apronyms.com should be working again within a few minutes.

A few pages don't work right now (like the tour of recent apronyms, the link to these forums, and some other URLs which technically don't exist but have worked nonetheless) but I'll figure that out after I've had some sleep.

The search form and submit form have changed slightly, so I suggest you try them out... the search form now ignores punctuation, even spaces, which means it returns a few too many results now because if you search for, say, 'mac' you also get results like 'chatrooM ACronyms'. I'll make it a bit smarter about that.

In the mean time, try submitting the same expansion twice, or submitting one which is already on the site, or making the common mistake of searching for an apronym with fullstops between the letters. Notice also that search results and random apronyms now link to apronymist apronym lists like the other pages do.

Please ignore the slight change in pattern on the sidebars on the front page.

Of course, it looks like nobody has bookmarked these forums, so you won't see this post until you've already seen the site. I'd better fix that link.