| At 00:00 UTC today, the main Everything2 server suffered a minor failure. Due to a Y2K-related end of month bug in Perl (we were unfortunately using version 5.003 and had planned to skip the updates to 5.004 and 5.005 and go straight to 5.6 sometime next week), the monthly old-nodes backup script failed.
Instead of backing up all nodes older than 3 months, apparently it restored some of them from next month's backup (scheduled for 00:00 UTC on 1 May 2000). Since that backup obviously does not exist yet, some node backups may have been deleted. The problem appears to be sporadic: some of your erased nodes may be accessible a certain proportion of the time, perhaps due to clock skew. It is also possible that the node has been kept, but under a different title.
As far as we've been able to ascertain, the only nodes affected are those matching this Perl regexp:
/^.*?(?=\d+|\$*)[A-Za-z_\s]+$/g
which were created or edited between 3 and 6 months ago (older nodes were successfully restored from tape).
Please hard link any of your own nodes which you think may be affected to writeups below this one; we will attempt to recover them manually, and then delete your writeup. Please do not soft link your affected nodes to this one. Only link your nodes which match this criterion - linking unaffected nodes will only make things harder for us.
While we realise that this may be something of a setback to a small minority of noders, due to the exponential growth of Everything2 in the past 3 months, and the somewhat restrictive nature of the regexp governing the affected nodes, it would appear that perhaps as little as 10% - an insignificant proportion of the nodes on Everythin2 - could be affected.
To encourage those who may have lost some of their nodes, 2 XP will be awarded for every restored node.
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