Wow! It's been over 5 years since the last update here. ^^;;
First I'll outwardly state what's likely very obvious, in that comparisons are almost definitely not going to be finished. I did try those years ago, but my motivation died. Not from the actual work involved surprisingly, I had a sufficient setup and did actually take down notes for the rest of the Doom Tree episodes in one long session with the intent of posting them up all at once the following day (since I needed that break). My undoing came from not realizing that my handwriting had gotten drastically worse over the years, specifically when writing as a rapid pace, so when I was going to transcribe these notes into the database, I was only able to read maybe a third of the notes. And that ended up being the anti-climatic finish. I didn't have another machine at that time to take notes digitally, and the thought of having to repeat those hours of work was just frustrating. Combined with other changes in my life happening and priorities shifting, I never ended up trying my hand at these again.
I haven't left SMU behind even though it's essentially an archive, I just haven't posted things in the updates since nothing was content related. It may have been noticed that I converted the site to be full-HTTPS, though I'll spare all y'all with my thoughts on why that makes me happy since I'm aware that it's me just geeking out for multiple reasons that almost no one outside of me cares about. I've also done an overhaul to the site's code, where it's running perfectly in PHP 7.2 which helps with performance and security. At some point I really want to make this site responsive, so browsing in mobile isn't as cumbersome as it is now.
What I've done today is bringing the forum archives back online at https://forums.smuncensored.com/ . Apparently I never addressed this in the updates, but at some point, the forum archives got hacked. When I was made aware of this, I was in a pretty low point in my life, and could not deal with it properly, so they were deemed lost. Earlier this month, Tiff reached out to me asking about any chance there was any chance of recovery. It turns out past-Dan did have some foresight by keeping a backup of this database from before a major forum upgrade, as well as a backup of the hacked database for hopeful cleaning, and had these both placed in a location that moved from server to server. The hacked database still had a lot of data so I was hopeful for a cleanup, but eventually found that a couple of the forums were definitely gone. The pre-upgrade backup worked without a hitch, so I put that through all the upgrade motions to run the latest software. I'm happy to report that this works perfectly. Of course various customizations are no longer there, but this was meant to be a discussion archive so that is moot, and these forums look good on mobile and desktop, so wins all around. It sadly does mean there is about a year's worth of posts not there in the time between the original upgrade and the closing, but I must accept that and realize this was the slowest time in the forums hence its closing. I'm just happy that I was wrong years ago and not all was lost. I even made a redirect rule where any links/bookmarks/etc will successfully redirect to this new location.
I hope all y'all enjoy! Essentially SMU is an archive site all-around at this point, but I will make improvements as needed to ensure that even though there may never be new content, everyone will still be able to see and reference what is here for some good nostalgia. =)
June 28th, 2018
Dan - Forum archives back online
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