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Missing addon threads.

sal_vager

By sal_vager
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Tex_NL

Tex_NL

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, /not/pol/ said:

Anyone have a download link for the surface experiments pack by CobaltWolfie?

Try searching the interweb for the mod. You know the name. Google knows where to find it. If I can find it within less than a minute so can you.

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Wallygator

Wallygator

Posted
Posted
On 10/01/2017 at 11:25 PM, Snark said:

Or you could give the longer form, which is essentially what was already said:

"We appreciate the inconvenience that this technical difficulty is causing our customers, and we apologize.  Rest assured that we are working on fixing the problem and will have things restored to normal just as soon as we are able.  We have taken steps to prevent this problem from recurring.  Thank you for your patience."

In all honesty, I gotta say that I've seen a lot of technical outages from various companies over the years-- most of them much better staffed and funded than Squad-- and that's about as much as I've ever seen by way of technical details.  It's very rare to put technical details out there, unless they're really necessary (e.g. for a security breach or something, which this isn't).

It's not unprecedented.  I do recall one major Amazon AWS outage a few years ago, for example, where they actually did send out a technical explanation of just what happened... but the Internet's collective jaws were dropping that they actually did that, because nobody does that.  (Not even Amazon, most of the time.)  I believe the reason they did it on that occasion was that it was a majorly embarrassing screw-up, on a scope many orders of magnitude worse than this little kerfuffle, and throwing open the doors like that was a way of trying to calm down the outrage.  It was an in-extremis move.

Companies generally don't release technical details of screwups because in general, it doesn't help the company, doesn't actually assuage the customers in most cases, and doesn't help resolve the problem any faster.  If going-public-with-minutiae was a thing that was helpful most of the time, companies would be doing it most of the time.

Is it right?  Is it nice?  Should it be different?  I dunno.  I may be too close to the problem, given that I've been working in the software industry for a couple of decades (including operating high-volume customer-facing services), so I've become accustomed to "how it's done".  I'm not really trying to defend the system here, just simply saying that this is generally how things work and Squad's not being atypical here.

... and I venture back in... (Why oh why...)

Just because a service team has done it that way their entire career doesn't necessarily make it correct or beneficial to all parties.

(And I smack myself with that elastic band in a few choice places...) OUCH!

A generic company may likely not be allowed to release details of service delivery failures in public (due to confidentiality constraints for example or even internal policy), but if they actually had a customer that "had them by the short hairs" via an intelligent sourcing agreement, then they would likely be compelled to share the details of their service delivery performance details in private.  Sadly, forum participants and license holders obviously do not have this leverage with Squad--> Such is life...  (We will never ever know, and we all need to deal with that on our own terms)

Reality is that SQUAD is not currently under any viable strategic sourcing delivery constructs to their global customer base (except for those who bought early AKA no charge for updates, etc which is quite narrow). So... they can evade all day long regarding nearly anything and no one can do anything about it except refuse to buy their product. (Squad's license agreement likely prevents any class action behaviour - I can't be bothered to read it...)

In all seriousness: WHATEVER... Who really cares? Squad will do what they want regardless of empathy with the community.  It's all good as long as the KSP product meets customer expectations (and only Squad will determine that).

Unless an entity granted funds to Squad via a stock purchase, there is no basis for any realised complaint.

However, there should always be a basis for suggesting improvements.

Now... let the debate continue to enflame itself!

TL;DR: Whatever... (Perhaps I should not have replied but hey, lets have some fun...)

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politas

politas

Posted
Posted (edited)
14 hours ago, /not/pol/ said:

Anyone have a download link for the surface experiments pack by CobaltWolfie?

The CKAN is sourcing downloads of SurfaceExperimentPack from http://spacedock.info/mod/318 

Alternatively, https://github.com/CobaltWolf/Surface-Experiment-Pack/releases/latest

Edited by politas
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Murdabenne

Murdabenne

Posted
Posted (edited)

My guess is at this point, they don't have a reliable and robust solution at hand that would not cause a rollback.

I'd say its time to go ahead and restart all those threads.   Use the Google cache to get the content and save time/effort recreating content.  I would like to suggest that this be done soon, because caches do expire, and that content will not be there forever.

I'll put an example below: Lets see what Google has for MechJeb

Chrome works best for this but I just did it in MS Edge to check, and that worked fine too. Basically go to google.com, paste the original base URL (from the first post on this topic) into the search box, and add the proper ending to force it to look for only the first page -- otherwise you get one of the last pages instead of that important first one. This means paste the URL and add "&page=1" to make sure it ends something like.... blahblah/&page=1

Copying the URL from the 1st post, this is the modified URL I pasted into google to find the cache link:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/111978-122-anatid-robotics-mumech-mechjeb-autopilot-260-12-dec-2016/&page=1 <- Note the ending added

Hit enter, and hopefully find the result you wanted. In that result, go to the far right just below the title, and there is a a small down-arrow - click that and it will offer up a rather plain button saying "cache"; Click on that. This will get you the cache version instead of trying to hit the link at Squad.   In this case I found a result in the cache for MechJeb page 1 that's a month or so old. 

Here is the link from the address bar displaying the page I got:  You can click on it and see the result I saw if you wish.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F_-BuagkZoMJ:forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php%3F/topic/111978-113-anatid-robotics-mumech-mechjeb-autopilot-258-22-jun-2016/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

And there you have it - page 1, Mechjeb forum thread.

Note that some of these cache copies might be a bit old, but at least you can get a majority of the content, download the pic or copy-pasta the text. Use a similar technique to get other pages by using a different number for "/&page=153".  Also, if you are adept at HTML, google can let you view the raw page source from the cache, which you can use to grab all the URLs for the resources, like imgur pics and videos and links to repositories.

Good luck.

Edited by Murdabenne
clarification
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DerekL1963

DerekL1963

Posted
Posted
17 minutes ago, Murdabenne said:

I'd say its time to go ahead and restart all those threads.   Use the Google cache to get the content and save time/effort recreating content.

Honestly, I wonder if it's worth the effort...  99% of the content in the MechJeb thread (to use your example) is old and outdated, referring to older versions and no longer existing bugs.

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Murdabenne

Murdabenne

Posted
Posted (edited)

I think you missed the point: The value isn't the outdated stuff posts that follow - its the content of that first post, which is modified and updated by the author every time there is a new release. This means the links, pics, credits, licensing, mod notes, and as well as the versions and explanations the author needs people to read. This is because those things will need to be posted to any new thread, and the continuity is helpful as well. That's all in the first post. The other posts on that particular cache page are irrelevant. The first post alone is worth it if for no other reason than to save @sarbian the time and effort it would take to recreate his top post for a new thrread - leaving him more time to play or work on the mod instead of trying to recreate that conent from scratch or memory.

Edited by Murdabenne
hit enter too soon
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Jacke

Jacke

Posted
Posted
6 minutes ago, Murdabenne said:

I think you missed the point: The value isn't the outdated stuff posts that follow - its the content of that first post, which is modified and updated by the author every time there is a new release. This means the links, pics, credits, licensing, mod notes, and as well as the versions and explanations the author needs people to read. This is because those things will need to be posted to any new thread, and the continuity is helpful as well. That's all in the first post. The other posts on that particular cache page are irrelevant. The first post alone is worth it if for no other reason than to save @sarbian the time and effort it would take to recreate his top post for a new thrread - leaving him more time to play or work on the mod instead of trying to recreate that conent from scratch or memory.

Well, as far as MechJeb is concerned, looking at the "temporary" topic for it:

@sarbian has already recreated the MechJeb first post in the new topic.  But for other topics, that's a good point.

I suspect the problem with this issue is that a number of topics broke, but we don't know how much they broke.  There may only be one database entry for each missing topic that's damaged or gone that then prevents the topic from being viewed.  Which means that fixing them isn't the same as restoring a deleted topic.  The fix likely requires a careful investigation to find out why the topics broke (very important) and what database entries were affected.  With that information, perhaps a manual restore of database entries along with some standard rebuild functions could fix it, but that's something that has to be certain in planning and preparation and may require significant downtime when executed.

I'm sure at some point we'll be told what's going to happen.

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sarbian

sarbian

Posted
Posted
15 minutes ago, Murdabenne said:

 The first post alone is worth it if for no other reason than to save @sarbian the time and effort it would take to recreate his top post for a new thrread

I did it last week. Google cache is not a hidden feature :)

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Beetlecat

Beetlecat

Posted
Posted
49 minutes ago, sarbian said:

I did it last week. Google cache is not a hidden feature :)

He just picked MJ from his head, not realizing you already had that covered. :wink:

50 minutes ago, Jacke said:

I suspect the problem with this issue is that a number of topics broke, but we don't know how much they broke.  There may only be one database entry for each missing topic that's damaged or gone that then prevents the topic from being viewed.  Which means that fixing them isn't the same as restoring a deleted topic.  The fix likely requires a careful investigation to find out why the topics broke (very important) and what database entries were affected.  With that information, perhaps a manual restore of database entries along with some standard rebuild functions could fix it, but that's something that has to be certain in planning and preparation and may require significant downtime when executed.

I'm sure at some point we'll be told what's going to happen.

Isn't it fairly clear it was simply the topics that consisted of the first "page" of the forum? They've been identified as of the first post in this topic.

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Jacke

Jacke

Posted
Posted
36 minutes ago, Beetlecat said:

Isn't it fairly clear it was simply the topics that consisted of the first "page" of the forum? They've been identified as of the first post in this topic.

Well, the first post of this thread lists 25 topics that broke and 25 is the number that are on a page of the subforum, but we don't know if being pinned and/or recent activity is what singled them out for what happened to break them, although that appears to be likely.  That first post hasn't been editted since it was posted and we have no further official info except that it's still being investigated.  Without that, we can't say anything except what is possible from each of our experience with database backends.

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razark

razark

Posted
Posted
31 minutes ago, Jacke said:

Without that, we can't say anything...

Unless we are Squad staff reporting that the threads have been retrieved or have been found irretrievable, we really don't have anything to say about it at all.

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DerekL1963

DerekL1963

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Murdabenne said:

I think you missed the point:


I think you missed that I specified 99% - not 100%.  And I did so for a reason, the very same reason you specified.   But even so, for at least one of those missing threads the first post was badly broken anyhow (due to the imgur album changes).

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Murdabenne

Murdabenne

Posted
Posted
4 hours ago, sarbian said:

I did it last week. Google cache is not a hidden feature :)

True :wink:.  But some folks are not aware of how to use it.  I just chose MechJeb as an example since its the first thing a lot of people look for :cool: -I was hoping, by showing how simple it was, that might encourage authors to do as you have done. I also intended to show the process of using the cache to less tech savvy users to find the cache for mods that haven't created a new thread, thereby saving authors questions.  Hope this helped the others, obv you didn't need it. Thanks again for the effort you demonstrate repeatedly for us to play a game.

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rsparkyc

rsparkyc

Posted
Posted (edited)
6 hours ago, Oromis said:

@NathanKell would you consider recreating the RO thread? And is the work on RO still going?

I haven't seen @NathanKell on in a while, but I can say that work on RO is still continuing: https://github.com/KSP-RO/RealismOverhaul/issues/1436.  My guess is he'll probably wait till there's a new release before opening up a new thread.

Edited by rsparkyc
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Nerfclasher

Nerfclasher

Posted
Posted
On January 16, 2017 at 3:53 PM, Jacke said:

Well, the first post of this thread lists 25 topics that broke and 25 is the number that are on a page of the subforum, but we don't know if being pinned and/or recent activity is what singled them out for what happened to break them, although that appears to be likely.  That first post hasn't been editted since it was posted and we have no further official info except that it's still being investigated.  Without that, we can't say anything except what is possible from each of our experience with database backends.

 Not all of them were pinned for example BDArmory Continued was not pinned

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Jacke

Jacke

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Nerfclasher said:

 Not all of them were pinned for example BDArmory Continued was not pinned

I don't think more than 2 or 3 topics were pinned.  But being pinned kept them on the front page and being on the front page is apparently what determined which topics broke, including the pinned ones like the Community Mods and Plugins Library topic.

Edited by Jacke
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John FX

John FX

Posted
Posted
On 10/01/2017 at 6:01 PM, Snark said:

Hi everyone,

*snip*

  Hide contents

Thank you for your understanding.

The question I was hoping the FAQ would answer was "Do the people working on the problem (praise them for they know so much unknowable by mere mortals) anticipate a repair of the old threads or is the prevailing opinion that we would be better off restarting them?" but that does not seem to have been answered in the extensive and informative FAQ which seemed to concentrate on repeating the answer "We are not going to tell you anything technical"

I don`t want to know.

Don`t care what happened or why, don`t care who did it or what will or will not happen to them, none of that matters much to me to be honest.

What I want to know is :

option 1, Is there a chance the old threads will get recovered

or

option 2, Will they have to be restarted?

 

If option 1, Cool, I`m sure it will happen as quick as they can do it but it would be nice to know if this is still a possibility after all it`s been nearly 2 weeks.

If option 2, never mind I`ll contact the thread owners individually or just wait as I am sure they want their threads running ASAP.

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