NineChime forum

Thanks Wacoon!  That is pretty much what I figured after creating a few posts/sketches of my own to see where the data went in the tables. My only hope is that the prior caretaker of the entire domain has a decent .sql backup that contains the oekakidta table within.  But, it would be really old.  I have a sql backup from 2019 but the table is missing from that backup as well.  My guess is that it vanished before I had access to the back-end of the entire site.

I think I can tie the original poster to the pictures that reside in the /pictures folder using the wayback machine, but it would be a painstakingly long effort. 

Did the oekakidta table also contain the data of the sketches themselves (i.e. no file in the /pictures folder)?  The apparent number of posts per person in the members table indicates that there are a LOT more drawings than what is in the /pictures folder.

If I manage to find an old copy of the oekakidta folder, I would like to pick your brain to see how I can manually update it from whatever version it is to 1.6.7.  But, first things first.  I must find it somehow, if it exists.


HUGE THANK YOU again for monitoring this BBS and responding so quickly!

~Blue

Ugh.  Been there a few times.  Server migrations are not much fun and service provider changes are even worse.

This is really good info.  The updater did not seem to properly upgrade the tables to UTF-8, but it was no problem to take the SQL statement snippets from the upgrade.php file and use them as SQL statements in phpMyAdmin to properly add any new or missing tables.

Since the oekakidta table was completely missing in the as-found, I was hoping that the first post in the oekakicmt file *might* be the original post info.  I actually tried to copy the first posts from the cmt table to the dta table with a well-crafted SQL statement, but as you mentioned (and can likely guess), the primary key is duplicated in the cmt file to tie them to the original post...  I did manage to stuff dta with unique data by doing a csv backup of the cmt table, doing some "Excel Magic" and putting the result into the dta file.  This made for a huge list of items to "recover" in the web interface.  But, the "recover" just nuked the bad entries int the dta file lol.  So, I just restored from the backup I made just prior to trying that and am back at empty working 1.6.7.

Not super excited about the idea of pulling each and every page from the Wayback Machine and restoring each by hand.  But, am not *entirely* opposed to the idea, either.  It is just time that that needs to be carved out.  It is oddly therapeutic, even though I am relatively certain that nobody else really cares.

I did do something similar after a service provider change when about 3 or so weeks when a different forum's data just went *poof*.  Google cache was my best friend at that time - I could actually save the pages, copy and paste them as new posts, then use a phpBB mod I found to both change the post date and author to "inject" them into the correct order of the threads.  Yes, I am apparently insane.  But, I love a fun challenge.

Have not heard back from the guy who *might* have a backup from *cough* 10 years ago when the most recent comment post was date stamped.  I have a hunch that the dta table vanished around that time because the then super-admin has a comment on the front page about the site being broken and reaching out to the owner (but had not heard back).  Further hunch is that the owner or someone updated the main site PHP Version and the oekaki site stopped working.  I did not have any involvement with the oekaki at that time.  It is just a few weeks ago that I decided to take a look and wondered if I could get it to be alive again...  ("Oekaki-Stuff" *is* working )

Thank you for the SQL INSERT line of code.  If I do try to restore by hand because a decent backup of the dta file is truly lost, then I may tweak that code to insert the record using the original postdate into the record instead of the current date/time.

If you are interested in seeing what the oekaki site looks like today, the link is here: oekaki dot pinkpt dot com

To see it "as-was", this is the WayBack, go to https://web.archive.org and search for pinkpt dot com / oekaki  (I just updated the domain redirect about 2 weeks ago to put oekaki up front).

It does appear that the WayBack machine may have only archived the front page.  If so, a true reconstruction may be impossible, but it looks like there is a lot there across the years that were archived.  And the good news is, they archived some of the original jpgs.

If my understanding of the file/post numbering is correct... In the pictures folder, there are files numbered between 1497 and 1798, most with three flavors - full size, thumbnail(t) and reduced(r)?.  If so, there are roughly 1496 pictures missing...  I am not convinced I have the time or energy to rebuild that many posts and properly tie everything together.  Sure, I can download any existing images from the WayBack, sort them out, copy/paste the original posts, etc.  but each will need to be resized twice into additional files. Seems like a nightmare.  But a fun one?  Not sure if it is worth it for a site that has not worked for nearly 10 years.

But, I will say again that I am absolutely *thrilled* and truly thankful that your site is alive, monitored and you are super-responsive to my posts (and patient with me, too)! 

Thanks again,
Blue