The good news is that I think I managed to track down the source of the problem with the whole disappearing act that the website did yesterday when I tries to upgrade the forums. I feel so stupid now. In a nutshell, I screwed up the data encoding when transferring the database from one server to another. Such a n00b mistake.

The bad news is that today I managed to lose some data... when I had to roll the database back to tonight's backup version, which basically wiped out any changes on the site (including forum posts) that happened after midnight. From what I can tell, we only lost one of my blog posts and one forum post (possibly more). I'm really sorry about this, it's totally my fault. Now that I know what I'm up against, I'll be testing my theories on the test site http://test.thesdsa.com/ before tweaking the real site.

Actually, when I rolled back the database, I meant to update the test dataset, not the production dataset... Such a n00b mistake...