Was anything lost in the move to pub165

[bwheeler]

It seems that the indexes in both Archived Topics and Event Archive have been messed up again.

For example, the thread "Michelle as a role model", which was just archived, is on page three of Archived Topics.

And looking at Event Archive, there are just five pages and only a few threads dated more recently than 2000. Didn't we have more threads from 2001,2002, and 2003 in that part of the forum?

[bwheeler]

For example, there are threads dated March 02 on page 20 and threads dated Jan 02 on page 15.

[Heather]

they were actually always like this. I have *no* idea why. I always found it odd.

[bwheeler]

that Tape Trade was not like this a few days ago, because threads that I had saved and that were located on pages 19 or 20 are now to be found on pages 14 and 15. This is just within the past few days.

I noticed this after the post mentioning the change to pub165. Experience has taught me that whenever ezboard makes changes, they very often mess things up like this.

The Projects section is another area that is out of sequence. Fan Chat, Skating Chat, Spoilers, and Random Chat seem, on cursory inspection, to be o.k. There may be other areas out of sequence; I don't have the time to examine all areas of the Forum.

But I do save threads from Tape Trade and, on going to page 20, I could tell immediately that something was wrong. I can tell which threads I have read because the history in my browser causes them to be shaded differently than the threads that are unread.

I should have had the whole, or almost the whole of page 20 in Tape Trade shaded as read. Instead, only a couple of threads at the bottom were so shaded. Further examination showed that the threads (mostly dated from January, '02) had been shifted to pages 14 and 15. From that point(page 15) the threads seem to go in reverse order (i.e., by increasing rather than decreasing order of last comment) although there are numerous exceptions.

The reasons for this shouldn't be rocket science. I am almost certain that ezboard maintains the threads in database format and the almost certain cause is that the database indexes have become corrupted. I used to work with databases and there are many, many different reasons that indexes may become corrupted.

The simple solution is to fix the indexes by re-indexing. This is purely a maintenance task and something ezboard should be smart enough to do on their own. But apparently they don't. They should have a Database Administrator (or somebody with a similar title) and he just needs to be told, "Hey, your indexes are corrupted; fix them."

Of course, finding him or the right person to talk to may be easier said than done. And generally to fix the indexes at least some of the system has to be brought down and the work done offline and they probably wouldn't want to do this just for our poor little forum.

But we pay them good money and I would think they should be obligated to maintain their data in good integrity.