#1: Minnie Fuerstnau (Minnie) on Sep 10, 2008

Jan,
Last night when I went to access your site, it kept giving me to a screen that said I was logged out and needed to log back in. No combination of name would allow me in. (I know I used the same password, but wasn't sure on the name.) After quite a bit of frustration I ended up creating a "new" account, but when I went to the user forum, my old statistics and name are gone. Any ideas??? Thank you. Minnie

Oh oh. I did a reap of idle accounts a couple days ago, which is only supposed to delete accounts that have not been used in over a year. Yours was definitely not in that category, but it seems to be missing. It looks like there is a very bad bug somewhere.

I should be able to restore your account, but only from a backup that is about a month old. That means it would have forgotten about puzzles you have solved and forum comments you have seen in the last month. I think I can update the puzzles you have solved from the log files, but I don't think I can restore partially saved files. I should have backed up the database before doing the reap, but I've never had a problem with a reap before and got overconfident.

It's going to take me a while to dig the data out of the backup and the logs and merge it into the active database. Do you want the "m.fuerstnau" account back, or would you rather continue as "Minnie"?

My deepest apologies for this screw up.

Looking at the backup of the database, I see that it seems to think that your last login time was August 1, 2007. So it looks like the reap was working right, but the update of last login times was not. I'll need to review that code.

Deleted

The stuff I originally wrote here was wrong. Never mind.

OK, I have restored the "m.fuerstnau" account from a backup dated August 8. That's the latest full backup I have. I will be going through the log files to find puzzles that you have completed since then, and marking those as complete, but this may not be done until tomorrow. You are welcome to do stuff freely on the account in the meantime. Solving new puzzles won't interfere with my marking old puzzles complete.

This isn't anything like a full restore, and I'm sorry that I can't do better.

Well, I found a faster way to mark puzzles from the log file, and did that. Hope I got it right. So I think this is as restored as I am able to make it. I don't have any other data to restore. Sorry again.

I think I figured out what happened. If you login in with "remember me" checked, then the software remembers (1) when the last time you logged in was, and (2) when the last time you did anything was. The reap program was only paying attention to the last login date, not the last active date. Minnie got bit by this bug because she hasn't "logged in" (as in entering her login name and password) for over a year.

I will fix the reap process to pay attention to the last active date instead of the last login date. The "last login" date displayed on the "Users" page already does this.

Looks like a few other accounts may have been inappropriately deleted as well. These include:

patterns
Rinaldo
lordofthemoon
jlorli
bobandchocolate
rdupraw

Might well be some others.

Jan,
Whew! I sure didn't mean to cause you so much bother! Thank you very much for all the effort you have gone to on my behalf. I would be happy to use the original "m.fuerstnau" with any attached info you can salvage. It is certainly not worth spending much more time on! Can you delete the new one I made today? Thank you very much- you are always so attentive to all of us that enjoy your site so much. Enjoy the beautiful weather- Minnie

I restored the other people listed above. Luckily most of them hadn't been on for a month, so a month-old backup was fine.

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