Update on the Pagan Book Club

To anyone and everyone who used to be a member of the Pagan Book Club,

I'm really I have to tell you this way, but after over a year of trying off an on to get the book club back up and running, I have to admit defeat. It's not going to happen. I sat down tonight to finally fix the trashed forum system, no matter how many hours it would take me of sitting on my ass looking at PHP script and playing with mySQL.

Then I thought, "why am I doing this?" To be honest, it's been a year, and if I really wanted to, I'd have fixed the damn thing by now, right? Isn't the fact that I kept giving up only to come back to it a few months later and give up again saying something? There wasn't much interest in it to begin with. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I did want the forum back up. I did want to have our chats about Harry Potter and randomness, and our really awesome discussions about the books we were reading. It was a lot of fun, and an important (albeit small) part of my life.

So I set to work reinstalling the forum, and trying to restore it, yet again. There were so many spam members that had signed up...no matter what I did to prevent them, I was getting upwards of 10 a day, and I just couldn't keep deleting them. There were spam posts from them I couldn't reign in. So I just deleted the whole thing...it had been backed up during a previous attempt to revive it. I reinstalled the forum from scratch, and it was beautiful. Then I restored the backed-up database, and...everything was gone.

It doesn't remember the userlist, so all of your names and info are gone. It remembers how many posts there were, and the details of each board, etc., but it can't bring them up. Clicking each board says "no posts," even though on the front page it says there are 13, or whatever. No matter what I do, I can't bring it all back...I could have, would have just copied everything to text files and pasted them in...done it all by hand, if I hadn't deleted the damn board. But I had no reason to believe it wouldn't work, since it hadn't lost any of it in previous restores.

But not it's all gone, and I have totally, and utterly given up. If we were to restart, it would be completely starting from scratch. If anyone is interested in this, please email me and let me know. If there is a big enough interest, we'll do it.

Blessings,
Starwyn
starwyn@solstace.net