Ok, where to start. I guess I should start things off by blaming my self for absolutely everything that went wrong. Friday went from surprisingly-according-to-plan to what-happened-to-the-plan fast. At least as far as the forum upgrade goes, it was a total belly-flop. So how about I tell you how it was supposed to go down, and then go over how it actually went down.

THE PLAN:

We didn't really have an ultimate plan. Believe it or not, that wasn't the problem. Actually, no, we had a plan, and it was fairly elaborate, but it wasn't complete until we finished testing vBulletin 4 and decided to use the upgrade as the pseudo-finale. For that to be believable to any degree, however, we had to first stage something that would potentially warrant the server actually going down: staff in-fighting. Conveniently enough that was more or less a part of what we wanted to do. So Robby plays the role of himself, as usual, and kicks things off with some random and unbiased temp bans, no major harm done, and Urouge and I disapprove. Robby kicks things up a notch and then "complains" to Vanessa, who, pretending to not really have all of the info makes matters worst. Once she is up to speed on things-- from her "point of view"-- she fights fire with fire: make Jerk Disease a temp mod. Except that he wasn't actually a mod, we just pretended he was by changing the color of his name. Robby continues to ban without bias while Jerk Disease throws out names to make things appear aimed. Due to some unforeseen circumstances-- the Collectibles section, for example-- we had to do some damage control mid-prank, but that was an honest mistake from the mods.

Long story short I eventually ban Jerk Disease, Vanessa and I have an immature fight for power, and the site goes down. Oh! And the filter was just a distraction to make the visible prank (the banning) an obvious and less stale April Fools gag. Changing that filter every ten minutes was pretty fun, I must admit.

So what went wrong?

THE FAILRUE:

The first-- and biggest-- unforeseen complication was an emergency coming up on Jonas's end. Jonas had to leave immediately, and as such was unable to relay to me that he wouldn't be around for the upgrade. See, the site was supposed to go down at around 3PM Pacific time, making the in-fighting relatively short and the chaos much more controlled. As many of you know, the site didn't go down until 11PM, so we were forced to make the fighting and banning more believable by escalating matters and stalling. I think that, really, is where, how, and why some feelings were hurt. For that, I apologize again. The whole prank was an act, so I promise you any and all theatrics were just that, theatrics.

Moving on: the upgrade. So I took the site down much later than planned and continued to wait it out for Jonas. As we all know, or should know by this point in time, Jonas never came back. I talked things over with the other staff and, having gone through the upgrade process two months prior, decided to do the upgrade by myself.

R.I.P Arlong Park.

No but seriously, the initial upgrade bombed out because of a few important files that decided they had no interest in being transferred with the rest of the crowd. This presented a huge problem for the database, and after some time of troubleshooting I decided to just drop the fubar database and load the backup from Friday. Six. Hours. Later!! the backup finally finished restoring and I started the upgrade again, making sure that the files were in place this time. SUC-sort of-CESS! The initial upgrade went through without a hitch, and I moved on to part two of the upgrade. This also was moving along quite smoothly until.... POWER OUTAGE YAY! My power went out. 93% complete with the upgrade and my power went out. Normally that shouldn't be a problem because I would have the session running on the server and not my PC, but in my haste I didn't (know to) run the upgrade within a new screen session, and when my power went out so did my session and that caused problems: From Sunday morning at 2AM until this morning (Monday) at 9AM the query had not completed and instead used up 100% of the CPU on the server, making it impossible for me to stop the query.

In comes this story's hero, Jonas. Jonas returned to save the day this morning (again, Monday) by restarting the SQL server. Once the server had been rebooted, I was able to restart the upgrade process and viola!, here we are.

So, let's all give a round of applause to Jonas, the hero, and throw some much deserved tomatoes at me, the villain, for thinking I could do the upgrade without Jonas.

THE END.

PS - Anyone who has a problem with Vanessa can take matters up with me, because she is awesome and was doing an EXCELLENT job playing the villain on Friday. Also, normally I'd blame everything on Robby and call it a day, but today I'm giving him a special day off.