What happened?
 

I checked the forum this morning to see the newest thread as this one from April 9. All my post since then are also gone. It looks like the database for some reason reverted to an arbitrary date...

*shrug* I've no idea

Fiiiiiix iit! >.<

Somebody needs to switch their backups service. A month is ancient, even on our highly trafficked little forums here. ;)

This problem might in fact, just be a temporary problem.
Maybe the drive containing the backups has been temporarily removed.
For some reason.

This problem will be resolved shortly,
wildhoney is probably looking into it.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Mhm when? :-P

Soon as you stop asking questions Tanax, that's when!

Wildhoney couldn't give a crap about this site, or if he does, has a funny way of showing it: but that's his prerogative as owner. So some posts were lost, and the same or worse could happen at any time without warning, there's nothing we can do about it.

Well it's nice to hear somebody say it. :) This site has a LOT of potential, but it's being buried under stagnation.

I don't mind missing posts. It makes me feel younger.

There was a guy who came on looking for a PHP coder the night that the stuff got deleted. So the loss of data was the loss of a project lead to me. Leads come and go so its not really a big deal, but it would be nice to be able to contact him/

There might be a cache (Google, Yahoo...) of the post around.

It was only a few hours old, but I guess its worth a try.

Is this a bad time to ask about other good php forum sites? Places where people are helpful and not snotty about it? This site was awesome like that for a long time.

" Places where people are helpful..."

Yes, many.

"...and not snotty about it?

No.

At least, not if you ask dumb questions. And just to clarify, because that seems to have become a necessity around these parts, I don't mean YOU nefus. I mean YOU figuratively. The problem around here isn't that people have turned into dicks (I've always been one), it's more that since things have slowed down we've gotten an influx of spammers and people asking for somebody to write them an entire application without trying to do anything themselves.

Your point though is well taken. If no one asks questions, then the site dies. I'm not interested in someone writing an application for me, thats zero fun and I wouldn't learn anything.

Heck... I'm not even a programmer by any stretch of the imagination. I just like playing with php to make web based tools pretty much for myself. I would say that php is the first "programming language" that I've tried to learn since basic in the 80s. I started playing with it off and on a few years ago when I needed a simple contact database. My design sucked but I got kudos from a technical marketing group because even though it was ugly, the site helped them find people they needed to expedite their jobs.

I hope you guys stick around here because I'm still going to ask some dumb slow-questions on occasion. :-D I'd still like a few decent links though because I do learn from other people's posts.

There are no dumb questions if you've done your best to help yourself at the same time. To be fair, and I'm confident that this is true of almost every skill level, everybody asks a question once in awhile that they find the answer to in some silly simple place moments later.

The most annoying question is, "I'm writing an application to <blank>, and I need to know how to <blank,repeated>." I'm writing an application to upload files, how do I upload files? I'm writing an application to write to a database, how do I write to a database? We don't know if you've tried, what you've tried, or if you're just blissfully unaware that there's a very good manual sitting right on PHPs web site. So instead of being able to help, we have to ask questions that should have been answered already, "What have you tried? What does your script look like? Are you getting an error, or are you just not sure where to start looking?". It becomes so redundant, I just don't bother asking anymore.

That aside, I think most of the people here will stick around. It's got a loyal, small, but loyal following. Sadly though if you need a question answered fast, you're better off on phpfreaks.com, as those forums are going almost non-stop.

Where here is a good question then.... where did all of these people come from all of a sudden.

I see what you mean in a new post in the general section. I responded. :-)

Maybe somebody needs to write an article on how to ask questions.

Well one steadfast rule everybody should subscribe to, just for the record, is never take my advice. It's generally a bad idea, and I don't care to be responsible. (for anybody taking my advice). Just putting that out there. :)

TalkPHP has excellent SEO.

I have an article on another site, it would mess with the SEO of that article if I post it on two sites. http://www.talkfreelance.com/showthread.php?t=67425

http://www.google.com
I am not being sarcastic. I program fluently in C++ and professionally in PHP, .net, MySQL, MSSQL and javascript and have not found a go-to site. Documentations of a particular language or library are useful (I find them via Google). Random forums found on Google do it from there. When all else fails I go to http://www.experts-exchange.com. I ask at EE a few times a year, I find links off of Google for already made posts there fairly often.

I know I can come across as rude sometimes, but I do try to help people. Sometimes my help is showing them how to help themselves, however as I have found sometimes people don't want to think for themselves. If they want me to do all their work, I will bluntly tell them no and show them how to solve the problem. Dhval is the only user I have ever actually given up on (was it you who commented something like your previous messages in his thread?).

Ahhh you pay for that?

Keep it in the open community. http://stackoverflow.com/