On Sunday, a site update mistake resulted in having to restore a backup. We had been previously unaware of a setting to back up all the thumbnail images on the site, and that this setting was off by default. This means that we inadvertently discarded the thumbnails for almost 50GB of images uploaded to Maker Forums.
No problem, they can be recreated! However, there are three problems in the meantime:
- The hundreds of thousands of processing jobs that are recreating the thumbnails are interfering with email delivery, so notification emails (and possibly new user sign-up emails) are not arriving reliably.
- Update notifications (under your avatar at the upper right) are late to arrive, for the same reason.
- The site is slower when browsing older posts, because it has to render the thumbnails as you browse.
If you are having trouble signing in as a new user because you are not receiving a confirmation email, please email admin@makerforums.info from the account you are trying to use, and tell us the user name you are trying to sign in as, so that we can help.
Based on prior experience, we expect it to take slightly less than a week to rebuild all the thumbnails.
Our backups now include the thumbnails, so this shouldn’t happen again!