Some weird bat thing got into the backend and unintentionally wrecked everything. Things will reappear here over time!
Well. That was certainly an eventful weekend.
For those that were unaware (which, admittedly and thankfully, is probably everyone), we had a bit of a catastrophic site failure this weekend. By catastrophic, I mean "it got destroyed and I didn't have any backups to fall back on". Yeah, I know. Golden rule ignored, and I Found Out, as it were. Don't worry, we weren't hacked or anything. This was an example of a routine operation gone horribly, unequivocally wrong. Murphy's Law, if you will. Let me explain.
The Ragnarok Raven website and forums run on a wonderful piece of German (over-)engineering called WoltLab Suite. Though the base content management system is free and open-source software, the forum and most addons we use are not, and require yearly license extensions to keep support and update access going. We were due for an extension come March of this year, but I decided to handle it ahead of time and upgrade early. Given I was operating on very little sleep, this was obviously a pretty big mistake. The extensions went fine--that process is so easy a child could do it--but the upgrade process was such a disaster that I was forced to tear it all down and rebuild. Well, forced may be an exaggeration; I made some critical unforced errors in judgement that resulted in the site needing to be completely rebuilt.
Chief among these was not doing regular backups, both file and database. I thought I had them, but I didn't, so I tried to make some post-facto. It didn't work; the database backup contained no actual data (why would you make this default behavior, HeidiSQL?!) and the files had been fucked by the botched upgrade before I tried. This means that yes, all data is gone, including old user accounts. We've been working on restoring the site to a bare minimum operational state, hence maintenance mode, but there's only three of us and was have to get the place open again eventually, so here we are.
All this to say I'm sorry. I fucked up, the site got nuked, and we've had to start over. Consider this a grand re-opening, with a more cohesive site experience, even though it means you'll all have to re-register. In fact, we encourage you to do so right now. Sign up and enjoy yourselves, and hopefully I don't fuck up this hard again.
--Nebulon Ranger, Web Services