The long downtime of the forum for more than three years was due to several reasons, both technical and non-technical.
For the technical side, the immediate reason was a crash of the underlying forum database (which itself was apparently caused by hardware problems of the server, resulting in sporadic file system inconsistencies). Such crashes happened before, but this time the database repair script unfortunately wasn't able to fix it, so the database was still corrupt. No problem, I thought, as I had nightly backups of the database on a remote system -- before I realized that the database corruption already started quite some time before it became obvious, and that those backups were already affected, too (and also failed to pass the consistency check script). So it was clear that cleaning up the mess would take some more time than just recovering from the last backup. Later I also had to discover signs of intrusion to the web server, which I had to track down and remove the results of the intrusion. The overall security state of the web server was weak anyway, as the underlying server was quite outdated, and the forum software phpBB2 was not supported anymore since more than one year at that time (and it was suspected to be the door for the intruders).
This all was combined with the non-technical reasons, which take up most of my free time available for R'n'D during these three years (and up to this day): My little son (which is not so little anymore), his new born sister (which is two years now), a newly founded company and an old house (in other words: real life as usual) that all need a lot of time and work and dedication that I then cannot spend on R'n'D and the forum anymore.
So please keep this in mind a little bit, and that I won't be able to be as present in the forum to answer questions or discuss new ideas (or moderate the forum) as in the past (even though I don't expect nearly as much traffic in this 4th forum anymore as in the "golden days" of the first three R'n'D forums anyway, but let's wait and see).
Now that the web server was moved to a fresh, new system (hardware and OS) and forum software (latest version of phpBB3), I hope that it will be stable again now and ready for some interesting new posts!
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
Last but not least a note for already registered forum users: Your existing user account of the old forum have also been converted to the new forum, but you have to request a new password: Just enter your account's user name and a random password on the "Login" page, and you will be instructed how to get a new password. For this you will need the mail address that you used for your old account, and the new password will be sent to this account. If you cannot remember your old account's user name anymore, or your old mail address for that account, or if you cannot access your old mail account anymore, just let me know by mail (to info@artsoft.org) and I will help you resetting your password and/or configured mail address.