In case you wondered why chorrol was down, both harddrives in the server had died. It was lucky I could get back anything at all, not to mention this quickly.

My thanks go to the support of our webhoster who worked miracles, and to my girlfriend who had to suffer through agonizing hours of me cursing my lungs out.

Oh well. More and better backups next time, I guess.

Oh gosh, thank you so much stargelman! You are indeed our hero!

Yay! Chorrol has risen from the dead! I thought the server went on a weekend bender in Tijuana!

More like a visit to the ER with a very narrow escape.

The fun part was how I tried to tell someone and wanted to register anew on the official forums to send a message to someone, and it didn't work because their server is kaputt too

Thanks for working hard to bring it back, stargelman.

A world without Chorrol would be much diminished.

Yikes, that sounds like a close call! I was imagining that the server slipped away for a spa weekend. Thank you for getting us back so quickly.

Thankyou! Thankyou! Thankyou!

Okay- now that I have that out of the way.... where can I send something appropriate Stargelman? I have some extra kitties... no, probably not.... And they aren't really extra, plus it's likely they would cause trauma to George the Server Hamster... which he obviously does NOT need...

To stop being silly for just a brief moment- I appreciate all your hard work and your continuing to host this very important corner of the 'Net.

Only my fellow Chorrolites can understand the severe withdrawal and anxiety I experienced.

Now I can go back to my normal, crazed and stressed-out state. Bless you, my friend.

DITTO! What he said! Thank you so very much, Starge! *takes deep breath* ... Thank you!

I'm seeing some unusual stuff on my display. Some posts made before we went down are displaying lots of little question marks inside little black diamonds instead of apostrophe's dashes and sometimes even between sentences. I've tried viewing things on both Firefox and Internet Explorer and see the same thing.

Here is a representative snip from hazmick's latest episode of his fanfic story. Is anyone else seeing the question mark symbols?

Yeah, I’ve been trying to put it into words. I’m away a lot but check in often. It’s a great comfort to know that Chorrol is here, and to see that folks I care about have stopped by. I kept telling myself that the Great Oak was not gone, it was just dark out and I couldn’t see it right now.


Yep, I'm seeing that too.

Well the database got zorked and needed repairs. It's quite possible that the last few entries weren't written to disk properly, hardly surprising the disk itself was causing about a gazillion IO error messages

I get that too (with Firefox). If you change your Character Encoding from Unicode to Western, the gobbledy-gook symbols will all vanish. In Firefox go to your Menu Bar -> View -> Character Encoding -> Western.

All bow down to Starge who shows us yet again that the The Force is strong with him.

Thanks Starge...I was beginning to worry as the day dragged one.

I thought the FBI had closed down the website or some crazy hacker got through. Wow!

Do you have any hints for Chrome?

Thank you. That worked and fixed the page I was viewing. I navigated away from the page, came back and the problem returned. I figured out that is because as soon as I navigate away from the page, Firefox bumps the setting from Western right back to Unicode. Do you know a way to make it stay on Western after I change it instead of returning to Unicode?

Okay, on Google Chrome:

Click on tools button (right corner of menu bar); click on "More Tools;" "Encoding;" "Western."


It works !!!! WOO HOO!!!!

Damn, was I worried when this place disappeared. So glad to see it back.

Whew
Pew pew pew

We're back in business boys

And here I thought it was my puter!


Thanks a million for getting us back up again, and this fast! I can bear losing Bethsoft but not chorrol. Again, thanks a million!!

I cannot get it to stay either. It looks like it is just the way Firefox is built. I think it supposed to automatically detect the right character set. But for some reason it isn't working.

Oh well, at least it is nice to know I wasn't missing something simple. At least temporarily dumping those symbols is way better than nothing.

Thanks, SubRosa. You are quite simply amazing at knowing about all this stuff.

Yes, thank you SubRosa; because I thought it was an Operating System language issue where the repaired or new server needed conversion to read the old files - would never have guessed it was encrypting.

And thank Starge again for fixing it to begin with! It is darn right lonely when this place is down!