The Talkhaustrophe

"The Great Talkhaustrophe" refers to the major one-month long downtime that Raocow's Talkhaus received during the month of October 2013, as well as the consequent loss of 4 months worth of posts. This happened mostly thanks to the incompetence of TLs4, but also of the forum's hosting service "Zanyhost", which not only failed to handle necessary legal matters (leading to the shutdown of their servers), but also failed to provide a recent backup for the forums, necessitating a 4-month rollback to the 2nd of June. History

Due to the nature of the Great Talkhaustrophe, it is sadly impossible to fully recreate the last moments of the Talkhaus before its host shut down on October 9th. However, what is known is that the Talkhaus had just recently undergone a major surge in new activity, quite unlike anything seen since its foundation, mostly thanks to new collaborative efforts like AZCT and ASMBXT taking off. General forum activity had stalled a lot between 2011 and 2012, and it was a breath of fresh air to have new users come in and contribute to the forum in so many ways.

Events

On the morning of October 9th, the Talkhaus was suddenly down. This wasn't all that uncommon and usually happened about once a month, so initially, the users weren't that concerned. Neither were the administrators, apparently, as TLs4 just assumed that it was one of their usual blackouts and tried resetting the forum's server. This, however, ended with him being unable to even access the server's maintainance page anymore, which was unlike anything else that had happened before. Raocow expressed his first worries about the forum in one of his “Hina's Fluffy Dream” videos after the Talkhaus had been down for more than 24 hours - however, this would just be the beginning.

The same day, October 10th, Zanyhost servers came back online, but the site admin TLs4 was greeted with nothing but an empty list of servers - he was unable to find any evidence of him ever owning the talkhaus.raocow.com domain. He filed a ticket regarding the error and received a reply on October 15th, stating that Zanyhost had experienced legal issues due to having been bought by a larger hosting company and consequently had to shut down their entire service. They promised TLs4 a quick resolution, and since he knew his last personal forum backups were from June, he decided to wait and hope.

Nothing noteworthy happened for the next two weeks. Zanyhost didn't reply to TLs4's ticket and actually closed it without comment on November 3rd, prompting him to write them yet again - however, without much hope of success. Meanwhile, IRC host Rena offered to temporarily re-host the Talkhaus on her server. This was decided to be the best solution for the moment, and on the 6th of November, the Talkhaus went up again after a blackout of one month, then under the domain http://uiharu.rena.so.

The next day, TLs4 set up domain forwarding for the server, and since then, http://talkhaus.raocow.com works again, albeit with lost forum data between June and October. This data, as of November 11th, is now confirmed as lost by Zanyhost and will therefore not be restorable.

Aftermath and Consequences

The Great Talkhaustrophe led to the loss of more than 4 months of posts, some of which included important data or files related to the many collaborations currently ongoing in the Talkhaus. The least affected of the projects was ASMBXT2, which had their own wiki to manage all game-related files, while the arguably most affected project was JUMP, having been just 2 weeks old at the rollback date. Other subforums were gravely affected by the rollback as well, most notably the Art Showcase, with the Demo Fanart thread losing two pages and other artists losing their entire threads.

Another consequence of the blackout was a lot of criticism aimed at TLs4 for having neglected making any backups of the Talkhaus. In fact, the one existent was the only one made ever and it was thanks to Thissa (manager of everything.raocow.com) that we didn't lose the entire history of Talkhaus.

It is yet to be determined whether this incident will have effects on the staff setup or the choice of host servers - as of November 12th, it looks like the site will stay on Rena's server for the foreseeable future.