This is an email I received from the Reef Central administrators
Let me begin by offering an apology from the administration of Reef
Central for any inconvenience or frustrations you may have experienced
during the hours Reef Central was not accessible. Let me also
immediately dismiss any fears that our databases have been compromised
or “hacked”, or that there has been any loss of data.We have been planning major enhancements to Reef Central for many
months. Many of these planned enhancements are a direct response to
requests from our most valuable resource, the members of our
community. We believe these improvements will substantially improve
your Reef Central experience with increased browsing speed, improved
search functionality, brand new selling forums as well as many
improved features for our Premium Members and Sponsors.For those of you who may not have ever noticed the round button with
the label “BB 75” at the bottom of each page on Reef Central, this
button relates to Reef Central’s ranking by Big Board.com, and
reflects Reef Central’s position as the 75th largest bulletin board on
the planet. As might be expected, you cannot achieve growth of this
size without developing a database of gigantic proportions. As part of
the planned upgrade process, some maintenance was scheduled for the
database. It was during this scheduled maintenance that errors were
encountered. Even though the upgrade was tested on our developmental
server prior to the live update, we still encountered some
compatibility issues between our database software and our board
software. Resolving these issues was a time-consuming process, as it
was directly impacted by the size of the database. A process that was
scheduled to be performed during normal nightly maintenance (and one
not expected to be noticed by the users) became an extended outage.A lesson the administration of the board has taken from this incident
is to provide frequent updates to our membership when prolonged
downtime occurs by utilizing a new web based communication tool that
won’t rely on our servers being available to communicate via email.
The main reason (and the most important one) is to keep our community
informed. Unfortunately, a secondary reason is to mitigate some of the
behavior we witnessed from the owners and administrators of other
reefing boards. It is an unfortunate truth that several reefing boards
used our downtime in an attempt to alarm our members and sponsors,
both by posting forged “quotes” from our administrators and by
engaging in rampant speculation as to the “demise” of Reef Central.
Reef Central has a standing, long-time policy of not allowing negative
discussion of other reefing boards on this site. We are saddened that
more communities don’t recognize the honor in this practice, and we
offer our apologies if you were upset by the irresponsible rumors
being spread.We recognize the importance of this community to our friends and
fellow hobbyists, and we will continue to do all we can to justify the
respect and gratitude that so many members have displayed towards Reef
Central.Ryan Baker
RC Administrator
webmaster@reefcentral.com
