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The Network returns after hard drive failure

We're back! And we're glad you are too!

Tuesday, 2 November 2004

Firstly... feel the love...

Following the failure of two hard drives, every single story that had been posted over the last three months, over 250 in total, has been lovingly restored by hand by the REALBrighton team. Each story needed to be recognised (I remember that night... it was when I had a really, really bad hangover the next day...) and the text married back up with the photos as far as possible. Big big thanks to Timmy, James, Huw, David and Scampy who have all been a huge huge help with this. And all hail the Mighty Google for archiving tens of thousands of pages of the site for us to reference when we had trouble putting the two together!

Listingswise... well... we're still reviving our listings database - but the reason that this is taking slightly longer is that we've taken this opportunity to overhaul the system entirely and spring-clean the data. I know it's not spring.

The downer, which unfortunately affects our dearest users - our VIPs, is that much of the user activity over the last three months has almost certainly been lost. This means that if you've registered with us recently we may no longer have your account details. It also means that if you've added captions or clicked "I'm in this photo" like we've been encouraging you to do, then this information may also have vanished.

We're bloody sorry about this (not as sorry as the bloke who knocked his tea our server, and then tripped up backwards over our backup drive on his way to collect his marching orders). We take this very seriously indeed and have taken immediate steps to ensure that data loss of this kind cannot happen again. Ever.

Things of importance to everyone:

If you're linking to a recent story from a personal page then please check your links to ensure that they still point to the same story. You may need to change the number at the end of the URL. These IDs will NEVER change again though!

If you're linking to a recent photo, then the same thing applies. Please check your link and update it if necessary (you may be directing people to a photo of you that turns out to be someone twice your age and the wrong sex. Not that there's a wrong sex of course).

Things of importance to our lovely, lovely VIP members:

If you have registered with us over the last three months you will, unfortunately, need to do so again if you'd like to continue using the VIP facilities on the site. Biggest apologies to you because we know it's a bit of a pain in the behind registering. We really hope you'll take the time to rejoin us soon, though.

If you've identified yourself in photos recently then you'll need to do this again if you still want people to know you were there. Get clicking and get listed on all those stories again please! This feature has been recently improved so that people can click on your name in a story and see one of the pictures within that story that you appear in. It's fabulous if we do say so ourselves!

If you've added lots of witty captions over the last couple of months, then, well, firstly thankyou! And secondly, next time you're feeling witty then please peruse the archives and add a few captions in appropriate places again. We will NEVER lose them again, we promise!

Things of little importance to anyone:

A litre of water's a pint and three-quarters.
I once went to Eastbourne and had an ice-cream on the pier.

...and finally

There are Big Things afoot. Oh yes there are. And we reckon you're going to like them very much. New features for the site and exciting news of other sorts. Expect announcements over the next few weeks.