Yesterday morning producer notes hit some turbulence, and didn’t quite make it through without sustaining some damage. Long story short, all the comments throughout the entire blog were erased. I have no idea what caused this, but I am still pretty amateur when it comes to maintaining web sites.

Lately I have been getting hit pretty hard by spam bots. I have my preferences set to moderate all comments, and I usually bulk moderate everything on posting days. Sometimes spam comments can build up quite a bit by the time I get around to moderating anything.

Yesterday morning I posted a new post, and then began moderating the comments. I selected the “Awaiting Moderation” tab in the Wordpress admin panel. I know for a fact that I was only moderating comments that had not previously been approved. I even went over each comment to double check that I was not marking one as spam that shouldn’t be. I marked around 120 comments as spam. When I was finished there were no comments under any category. Not under the “Show All Comments” tab, the “Awaiting Moderation” tab or the “Approved” tab. Everything had been erased!

I figured the best thing to do would be to restore my previous database backup, but the most recent backup I had was a month old. Restoring it meant that I was going to lose 5 posts. I decided to do it. Once I got the old database loaded up, I noticed that some things were out of sync with the blog vs. the feed, and there were a few other broken features. At this point I felt that I was losing too much, and trying to save a few comments was just not worth it. After all, my blog is still pretty new, and I really didn’t have that many comments (only five). So I “un-did” the backup, and decided that I would just lose the comments.

But this morning as I woke up I was not happy with this decision. I felt I really needed those comments even if there were only five. Having comments on your blog is an integral part of what gives a blog its value. I highly value the interaction of people, and joining together as a team to build something. It took a lot of dedication to get those comments, and I distinctly appreciate each person that took the time to stop by and interact on producer notes. To just let that go like it meant nothing would have been a disrespectful waste.

So after much flip-flopping on the issue, I have decided to restore the month old database, regardless of what content I lose or what features break. I do have the five lost posts on file which I plan on republishing one at a time over the rest of the week. Any features that end up breaking I feel confident will be fixable. And if the RSS feed gets out of sync, worse things have happened. The important thing is that I have my comments back. Well, most of the comments. Unfortunately I was not able to recover one comment, and I’m sorry for that.

Sorry if my mishap has caused any confusion. Thank you again for being subscribed and/or loyal readers. In the end I have learned a few things from this incident. The first of which is that I’m going to vamp up my backup routine to a more frequent schedule.

You should begin to see four of the five lost posts start to reappear, starting today with UstreamTV and following with:

• eSession on 6/4/08
• Jonathan Harms’ New Blog on 6/5/08
• 5 Tips to Make Your Recording Sessions More Efficient on 6/6/08

I’m going to leave one post, Leave of Absence, unpublished as it is no longer relevant.

Thanks to those who have participated in the interactivity of producer notes.

Photo in this post taken by a little azorean and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License