Your biggest "oops"

Have you ever made a huge mistake as an admin? Perhaps you accidentally deleted a sub-forum with thousands of threads? Or maybe you sent a mass e-mail out from your test board?

Share your big mistakes.

 

My biggest mistake was ever using phpbb as a software, I lost our whole DB by installing quick reply rofl

Second oops was using $username in a mass PM when it isnt parsed into their username lol

 

oh, I've made a few database blunders and the like. But one thing I've learned is, no matter how minor it seems, never install an upgrade or mod and then go to sleep without testing it. It's really embarrassing to wake up, log on, and discover you left the place riddled with errors the night before.

 

Delete the database by mistake. Darn that vista panel! I don't have to worry about that now ! : D

 

i wanted to update vbulletin and backed-up only my /forum/ directory.
then i accidently uploaded all the vb files into my root directory, where my joomla installation was located. it took me nearly an hour to discover where the errors came from and why this stupid vb install script didnt want to update xD

this never happened to me again

 

Accidentally deleting the entire forums database. Fortunately, I had just made a backup.

 

Like others, I accidentally deleted a database and all went to hell - I never made a backup, either.

:doh:

 

Installing a modification when I had been drinking, crashed the site, and it took about 3 - 4 hours to fix everything. I was up until about 2am or 3am trying.

I finally gave up, - dang keys kept moving on the keyboard - started a restore of the database and went to bed. When I woke up, the site was back online and everything was ok. We just lost about a weeks worth of post.

 

What did the members say, Kevin? Have they let you live it down yet?

 

I just told them that there was a problem with the site last night and we had to restore the database. This was about a year ago, so its been long forgotten about.

 

About six months ago, I had to rebuild the main server, so I moved the entire site to a temp server - no problem. A week later I moved it back, but forgot to check the attachments (stored in the file system). After a couple of days, thinking everything was ok, I zapped the temp box. Hours later we found that the attachments had not moved ok, and since the only copy had now been zapped, we lost them all.

 

No fun, Paul - kicking yourself after the whole ordeal?

 

Wasnt happy at the time.

Its funny tho, the members didnt notice for about 2 weeks, and once I said we lost them in the move, they kinda shrugged their collective shoulders, and that was it.

 

Whenever I've made mistakes like that I tell the members how I screwed up, then follow it with "The people responsible have been sacked." Lightens the mood a little.

 

Any of you ever had a member (or members) hold a grudge after making such a mistake?

 

Not as of yet, but so far my blunders have been only temporary ones that the forum has recovered from.

 

Same, Michelle. I've seen some communities get pretty ugly after experiencing some sort of "trauma", however - it's quite brutal.

 

I am recovering from one trauma, not an oops caused by me but by the original admin.

 

Tachy Goes to Coventry aka Global Ignore on vBulletin

put a user on it and went to bed, well I may or may not have sniffed an open bottle of 1% alcohol throughout the night (yeah I was wasted from a party, but the user did deserve it), instead of just using a space between userid numbers (we had one other person on it already) I accidentally used a comma

MySQL spit some mean errors and we didn't catch it until 6 hours later when I woke up... good thing it was overnight

 

you're lucky

I still get comma comments! hahaha