It's been several years since the Slayers Hentai Forum went offline but I still have my outdated link on my main webpage.  So, I thought it was time I wrote this up. 

The cause for the loss of the forum was a old installation of wordpress, Lunarpages, bad backups, and me switching to Linux.

First, there was an old installation of wordpress on the webspace from my wife.  She had used it for some time and then gave up on it and it sat there idle.  At some point it was hacked and increased the processor usage to 100% on my host.  According to the offical e-mail from Lunarpages the host is meant to service hundreds of websites so for mine to peg it out caught their eye quickly.  What they did then was migrate all of my files to a premium server that could handle the load and suspended the processes running on the website.  When I became aware there were isssues my server log quickly showed wordpress as the culprit.  I deleted the files and informed Lunarpages that all was right with the world. 

It should have been a simple matter to migrate the files back to the origional server but in the process, all of the behind-the-scenes tables for the Slayers Hentai Forum on the server side disappeared.  Some of these are backed up in the normal backup process, some are not.  I contacted Lunarpages but they basically told me "Tough Luck". 

Somewhere in the meantime the PHP BB forum software we used was upgraded.  When I did a fresh install of the current version using the tools Lunarpages provided, it would not accept my backup data because it was from a different version.  Lunarpages would also not allow me to install an old version of PHP BB (from which I could later do the upgrade) due to security risks.

At the time I was just getting used to running on Linux and couldn't pull off everything I wanted to.  Eventually I found the tools to re-build the databases manually from the backups but my most recent backup, at the time 3 months old, was found to be corrupt.  That left me with a backup one year old.  I worked on that for a few days trying to get anything up and running and hit a wall. 

It was at that time, based on the activity of the forum (just a few new posts a week) as well as the popularity of Slayers (this was pre-Revolution), that I would not start a new forum.  I just... let it die.  Still, to this day, I feel bad for that decision.  I feel bad because we did have a lot of good discussion over the 4-5 years we were up and running as well as quite a bit of art.  I would have loved to just get a version up and give people the time to say goodbye to it and get what they needed.

I still have the backup files, but that is about all.  It was fun while it lasted but I think I still cared the most for the forum from anyone.  In the years since it went down I have never received an e-mail asking about it.  Sad, but true.