Greetings LPA Members,
Thank you for your patience earlier today as we worked hard to fix the database issues that plagued our forums for the better part of the day. A corruption of the forum "search" table in the database lead to our forums suffering a fatal error, and as a result, certain forum databases were not updating, and other parts of the forums were virtually inaccessible from early this morning until only a few hours ago. While your posts still went through (and no information was lost), many of you were greeted with errors upon trying to reply to a thread, and some even were unable to read new posts as vBulletin was not registering the replies in the threads. We understand how frustrating these issues (and the server related downtimes) have been for you, and we want to thank you for the amazing show of respect, love, patience and support that you have given us over the past few days.
While completely avoiding downtimes is almost impossible, as we cannot afford to buy a corporate level server or "scaling" servers (300 dollars and up a month), we have recently installed server optimization software (CloudFlare) that we hope will greatly limit site crashes, or at least prolong the amount of time it takes until the site goes down. So far the results have been promising. In the 72 hours since the server optimization software was installed our website has endured close to 2.5 million hits, and has stayed up the entire time throughout the extreme traffic. While some people encountered forum glitches today, those issues were unrelated to the server (and instead completely on vBulletin's end) and we are cautiously optimistic that the days of 1-2 hour long downtimes may be (for the most part) behind us.
Only time will tell. In the meantime, if you wish to donate to us to help with us purchasing upgrades to help the site, you may do so through the donate link in my forum signature.
Thanks for your understanding. We are so thankful for your support!
-LPA Staff
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