Site Status / Crash recovery information and planning

[BinaryMessiah]

Do we need to add images that are missing, or do we need to hold off and keep waiting for the database to update? I don't want to start mass submitting images and bog anything down. I'm not sure if you guys need help from the users or not.

https://vgcollect.com/forum/index.php/topic,13012.0.html

Okay...so if I'm understanding this correctly, we just wait, and over time everything will get restored?

To my understanding, two separate restoration attempts were made. Everything that could have been done was, meaning entries will need to be manually updated going forward. At the time of that post, 32,00 entries were still affected with missing front images.

Okay, so that leads to my original question then. Are those being restored manually by admin, or do these have to be submitted by the public users? That's what I'm wondering. I apologize if I seem ignorant on the issue. I'm kind of clueless as to how this site works on the backend. I just want to ask first, as I don't want an angry message telling me to stop submitting images and cool it. I would, of course, only submit for missing images from my collection.

[dhaabi]

To my understanding, two separate restoration attempts were made. Everything that could have been done was, meaning entries will need to be manually updated going forward. At the time of that post, 32,00 entries were still affected with missing front images.

Okay, so that leads to my original question then. Are those being restored manually by admin, or do these have to be submitted by the public users? That's what I'm wondering. I apologize if I seem ignorant on the issue. I'm kind of clueless as to how this site works on the backend. I just want to ask first, as I don't want an angry message telling me to stop submitting images and cool it. I would, of course, only submit for missing images from my collection.

No worries. There easily could have been better transparency with the problem, what was being done about it, and its current status (for instance, a pinned topic, the first post of this topic updated, or the title of this topic changed.)

Several staff are involved with the image restoration process, but it is a huge hurdle that will need to be a community effort should those wanting images to be restored to be completed in a relatively timely manner. So, members are free to help if they feel inclined.

[BinaryMessiah]

To my understanding, two separate restoration attempts were made. Everything that could have been done was, meaning entries will need to be manually updated going forward. At the time of that post, 32,00 entries were still affected with missing front images.

Okay, so that leads to my original question then. Are those being restored manually by admin, or do these have to be submitted by the public users? That's what I'm wondering. I apologize if I seem ignorant on the issue. I'm kind of clueless as to how this site works on the backend. I just want to ask first, as I don't want an angry message telling me to stop submitting images and cool it. I would, of course, only submit for missing images from my collection.

No worries. There easily could have been better transparency with the problem, what was being done about it, and its current status (for instance, a pinned topic, the first post of this topic updated, or the title of this topic changed.)

Several staff are involved with the image restoration process, but it is a huge hurdle that will need to be a community effort should those wanting images to be restored to be completed in a relatively timely manner.

Fantastic! Yeah, a new pinned topic would really help for people wondering what the deal is and what the admins need from us if we choose to want to help, and maybe a run dow of what exactly happened. Maybe updates with the current status over time would be nice. Like a monthly update. I will submit images then. I also have a flatbed scanner if any images aren't online for a game.

[theodw]

Yikes!

Okay, I'll try to restore some of the covers I have on hand right now, but won't be able to add all of them (Some of my games are currently on the other side of the world).

[tripredacus]

To my understanding, two separate restoration attempts were made. Everything that could have been done was, meaning entries will need to be manually updated going forward. At the time of that post, 32,00 entries were still affected with missing front images.

Okay, so that leads to my original question then. Are those being restored manually by admin, or do these have to be submitted by the public users? That's what I'm wondering. I apologize if I seem ignorant on the issue. I'm kind of clueless as to how this site works on the backend. I just want to ask first, as I don't want an angry message telling me to stop submitting images and cool it. I would, of course, only submit for missing images from my collection.

No worries. There easily could have been better transparency with the problem, what was being done about it, and its current status (for instance, a pinned topic, the first post of this topic updated, or the title of this topic changed.)

Several staff are involved with the image restoration process, but it is a huge hurdle that will need to be a community effort should those wanting images to be restored to be completed in a relatively timely manner.

Fantastic! Yeah, a new pinned topic would really help for people wondering what the deal is and what the admins need from us if we choose to want to help, and maybe a run dow of what exactly happened. Maybe updates with the current status over time would be nice. Like a monthly update. I will submit images then. I also have a flatbed scanner if any images aren't online for a game.

I'm not really certain about doing a thread like this. This is for a few reasons. First, the regular workload in regards to entries and image uploads is already pretty much handled in some member work threads:
Dhaabi: https://vgcollect.com/forum/index.php/topic,11436.0.html
myself: https://vgcollect.com/forum/index.php/topic,6782.0.html
leonefamily: https://vgcollect.com/forum/index.php/topic,11461.0.html
But there are others that do a lot of work but do not create threads such as nathan776, bizzgeburt and coffeejits. And obviously those threads do not always get updated frequently.

Second, I do not feel that it is appropriate for us to attempt to direct all users to do anything, which is what a public thread would indicate. This has always been a "help if you want" type of site and I don't want anything to make people think we are ordering anyone to do anything, like replace missing front arts. There are enough active readers in the forum that know about this issue and want to help and know about this thread.

Third, any important news or changes should already be reflected in a post or thread in this News section of the forum.

Outside of that, I can tell you what my current worklog is in relation to the issues in this thread:
- fix arts in my collection
- then wish list
- then sell list
- in SMS cats
- in Saturn cats
- in Gen/MD cats
- in GG cats
- in Sega Computers cats
- in DC cats
- in PS2 Consoles cats
(this isn't to say I am taking ownership of these, anyone can help if they want but I will be going through all of these before returning to my general DB nonsense)

Then I will work on updated the Ratings thread in Adv section, which in turn means that I will upload and link the ratings images so they appear on item pages.

I can't specifically say what Jason is working on as he has not shared any sort of task list, and it is up to him whether or not he would announce any change on the forum.

I will rename this thread tho.

[dhaabi]

Outside of that, I can tell you what my current worklog is in relation to the issues in this thread:

For myself, I am only focusing on PlayStation [JP] for the time being. I'm projecting the time to repair the category will be a few months, since I'm being quite thorough. Most art found online for this specific library omits the outer layer obi, and I'm making my best effort to find artwork with it. To the best of my research skills, I'm also updating obi-present artwork that's stock art, but that is, unfortunately, not going as successfully as restoring lost art is, as many of those items aren't common.

At first, I began going through the category alphabetically, but I then decided to go through specific members' collection whom I know own large numbers of PlayStation JP items first. I've gone through about a dozen members' collections, but I'll be resuming where I left off alphabetically soon.

[tripredacus]

Filter search field on the top of the Browse page returned.
https://vgcollect.com/browse

[marvelvscapcom2]

Earlier today.

Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.


Constantly when trying to access forums.

This is a common occurence and was before the big crash.  Just wanted to bring this to attention in case its of note.

[tripredacus]

Yes we are aware. There is a limited amount of connections that the database engine will allow at one time, and when that number is reached, it will be slow and/or show that error message. Connections does not necessarily equal the amount of users, so we are going through the long and complicated process of determining whether we need to change how the database is interacted with or if we need to scale the site to handle additional traffic.

The crash was unrelated to this database connection issue.