Welcome back. What happened? Long story. Hardware issues. Then, in the middle of it, a family emergency. I put the site in maintenance mode and flew off. I stopped thinking about the site, because there were more important things. I thought, what's the worst that can happen?
Welllll. Guess who got a properly formatted intellectual copyright complaint, for the country we were hosting in, for the first time in 7 years, while I was completely utterly focused on other things? That's me!
So where do we stand a month later? Well. It's not as bad as I initially thought. Data was able to be recovered, but the loss is real. About 7-10% of MEDIA (not posts) from any given board. Slow moving/older boards were hit the hardest. There's a new 404 image specifically for that!
During the downtime, I did hard, hard research about how to avoid this in the future, and the answer was simple: no more single point of failure. In the past, we ran a very traditional setup: one server, one app, one firewall, one set of drives, one provider.
Now, we have a distributed, modern setup. The site you're accessing right now? A VPS front-end. I can spin another up in minutes. $50/month, unlimited bandwidth. It doesn't actually host any files! Instead, it's connected via wireguard tunnel to the ACTUAL server running in some backwater country with no laws. Additionally, we have our own, self-hosted discord replacement now (chat.bbw-chan.link) that requires registration tokens (issued by yours truly) to access, for when Discord inevitably shits the bed. We also have a seperate backup server!
So now, no single point of failure can take us down for long. If our backup server goes down, we still have the back-end and front-end, we can just spin up another cheap backup VPS and make another copy. If the front-end goes down from a provider getting tired of us, I spin another one up on another provider, and the back-end and backup server re-sync over wireguard. If the back-end server goes down, we buy another, and restore from the backup. In all cases, we can always communicate, via our own self-owned encrypted E2E matrix server.
Oh, we also got the latest front-end for lynxchan, Kohlnumbra, all modified with new themes and bugfixes. Hope you like it. It's not done. We'll port over some missing features soon.
So, welcome back. Sorry you had to wait.