From the Editor 
On Last Week’s Site Outage

^[1]328 words

On August 22 and 23, I began to notice that parts of Counter-Currents were breaking: inventory was not being updated after sales, the print option disappeared, etc. Then, on Monday, the website went offline. Naturally, I panicked.

Admit it, some of you did too. I was deluged with emails, calls, texts, and Facebook messages — many of which I was simply too swamped to answer. Some of you might have even tweeted at me. Even Heidi Beirich of the SPLC wrote to inquire, no doubt hoping to learn that her attempts to put me out of business ^[2] had borne fruit.

I don’t know much about how websites and servers work, so I asked for help from three guys named Mike. No, we were not hacked. The three Mikes worked with the server tech support people, and eventually it emerged that the physical machine our virtual private server was running on had suffered mechanical problems, so they moved the Counter-Currents virtual machine to another physical machine. But somewhere in the process, they broke something, and the failures cascaded and shut down the database.

We were offline for about 2-and-a-half days, and when the site was restored by the first Mike, we had lost all the posts after June 9th. Then the third Mike recovered all the posts up to August 14th, but everything after that has been lost. We recovered all the posts from the Way Back Machine, and I will restore all of them when I have the time.

Unfortunately, the comments for the posts are gone, and so are the web traffic statistics. Even with the downtime, however, we topped 100,000 unique visitors for the third month running. A more detailed report will appear in our next newsletter.

We are still working out some bugs, so if you notice anything amiss, please contact me at [email protected] ^[3].

I want to thank the three Mikes, and our writers, donors, and readers for getting us through this rather stressful period.

Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief