The Great Server Disaster of 2022

Didn’t we already deal with this fun in early 2020? Yes, in fact, we did. And the component which was faulty then is the same one that failed again. So I decided to transition to managed hosting, which is a great opportunity to discover all the stupid things you were doing before. Like serving a “UTF-8” site full of latin-1 encoded strings. This was the thing that kept the forum down the longest, trying to shoehorn this mixed bag of a forum database into a true UTF-8 backend. It won’t be entirely without bumps.

In the end, we performed encoding conversion on the forum on a record-by-record basis: If any text within a record was not valid UTF-8, the whole record was converted as latin-1 text to UTF-8; most notably, posts by people with special characters in their name from way back will have had all their posts get this treatment. It’s also possible that, in certain places, text got shortened to the middle of a character and was thus judged invalid. It’s also possible that special-name people will have trouble logging in. So let me know what issues you discover, and I will see about writing scripts to reprocess things with a bit more granularity. I’m quite busy at the moment, but I very much prefer to preserve things as they were, not leave them janky.

Yes, I know my signature is borked; for some reason it didn’t migrate, and that will be corrected as well.

Like serving a “UTF-8” site full of latin-1 encoded strings.

Amazing.

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