Extreme forum down-time on a very large forum

Forums

The Rotten Tomatoes Forums have been down for quite some time now. This is a very, very large forum (I believe it has 20,000,000+ posts). The original page was the usual closed vBulletin forum message that said they would be down from May something to June something (two weeks, I think). Now they've had that newer message up for quite some time. Even with the amount of traffic the forum will still obviously get if and when they come back, this can't be good for them.

I just found this extreme down-time on such a large forum to be interesting.
Does anyone have similar stories on their own forum, maybe?

 

Ugh, that's absolutely horrific. Fortunately, I've never had this happen to me.

 

About 3 years ago, a forum that I am a member of was hacked on and off for about 6 weeks. The site would go back online for a few days, get hacked - defaced - stay offline for a few days, get fixed - get hacked a few days later - defaced - stay offline for a few days. The longest time I saw it down was 2 - 3 weeks.

A lot of the members moved on during this time period.

The forum owner finally switched from phpbb to smf and the hacking stopped.

It took the site months to return to its normal - pre hacking activity.

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My personal experience, I took my main forum down for about 3 weeks one time. This is when I moved to a new host and switched to VB. When I reopened my site, most of my good members signed backup within a week or so. It took this one member about a year to come back - he was really mad at the site being down.

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Being down for an extended period of time can have a really negative impact on your forum. Both in members and ranking in the search engines. Once your down for 2+ weeks, your site starts having its pages delisted.

To give you an example, I had a screw up on my site map and it was not submitted for almost 4 weeks. During that time 300,000 of my URLs were delisted from google. Traffic dropped from 12% growth to 3% growth. This was almost 8 weeks ago and I still have not recovered.

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Once the rotten tomatoes forum hits 6 - 8 weeks of being off line, it should start having its pages delisted. Unless their still submitting a sitemap while the forum is down and have some heavy backlinkage. That might help keep the pages indexed.

I checked the number of indexed pages for rotten tomatoes and its still over 400,000 - which is good. But the last cache for the forum was late may, around the 19th - 22nd or so. That is only 3 weeks.

 

Wow, and I thought my worst downtime of several hours was bad.

 

As did I, Michelle - now I'm not as worried.

 

I've never been down for more than an hour or two. Let's hope that doesn't change.

 

It must be quite the extensive "software update".

 

Surprising.

Being such a large forum, I would expect them to reopen within a few days, if not any longer than a week.

Personally, my only site that has gone down was down for about an hour or so. This happened yesterday. I'm assuming it was an unexpected server failure.

Other than that, my forums will only down expectantly. All Star Gaming Pro being the exception.

 

I was down nearly 2 days after a 5000 bot DDOS attack hit me hard. It would have been hours of downtime versus days except I had plans and couldn't attend to my server. Once I was back I was able to mitigate the attack within 3 hours. The attack didn't stop though and for another 3 days I had to monitor everything.

If my server gets compromised I would redirect DNS to a new server and rebuild in a couple hours from a backup. I would never be down for more than 2 days imho from a complete compromise. DDOS attacks are more tricky since they can be mitigated and you never know if they will last an hour or a week. And even changing DNS won't stop the attack. As a matter of fact at times you have no choice but to take your server offline.

To be down 2 months...that's gross negligence on the part of the staff. I know 20 million posts isn't easy to deal with but they should setup a temp forum with the user table until they can recover complete site. There are always things you can do.

 

When we got our domains stolen, we were down for a day until I realized that what happened in one hour wasn't gonna be undone in that amount of time! So, I set the site up on some other domains we had for three weeks until we got our real domains back. Our user activity got up to about 65% of normal when we got the domains back. It's still only around 95% or what it was. While we didn't have the domains, we lost our nice multilist of links on google (whatever it's called where they list your 'popular' forums/links), but they were back within just a couple of weeks.

 

I'm sure that was difficult, but I'm glad your forum didn't die from all that downtime.

 

Just as an update, the forum in the first post is still down! I think it's almost been a month for this 20 million+ post big-board.

 

It's up now.

Being with a datacenter I feel confident my sites will never be down, and I've instructed on my account that in the event of a DDos attack on my servers, I would like them to deny traffic from those bot lists or do whatever in their power to stop the attack.