Everybody has to learn, and everybody makes mistakes. But when you are a site administrator you make a mistake and it becomes news, for some reason.

What are your mishaps during your admin-ship on your or other peoples' forum?



In the past I have found myself making mistakes in deleting a style thinking I am moving it, not backing up my web site and crashing. And deleting my permissions so everybody could read my staff forum for 2 whole days! (It even got googled).

Thankfully this was on my personal web site and not the company web site.

Not noting the files for the hacks we added. At one point, it was so bad, we literally couldn't upgrade because some of the custom solutions we added we almost ad-hock in nature and never documented.

I installed the NNTP newsgroups feed hack.

It takes all the threads from the newsgroup and inserts them into a forum.

It then takes new posts to those threads and sends them back to the newsgroup.

After an upgrade in which I installed a fresh vB and did an Impex, the thread/post tables had lost the column that the NNTP hack looked at to see if a post was old...so it assumed every post in the forum was old, and inserted them back into the newsgroup.

Oh, the abusive mail I got from those newgroup members.

Made an hack (in about 2 days) and overwrite in with an old version totally without the hack (w00ps).

Just did not set the forum permissions right so that normal forum users could have a look in the admin forum.

As the owner of a server I totally destoyed the linux so that the dedicated provider must install it again. With some costs about 100 euro. :P

My mishaps? (These were when I was 10 and 11 mind you), I deleted the MySQL database for a few days and didn't know how to get to phpmyadmin, or SSH/Telent to reupload it. I accidently uploaded a blank copy of index.php to the root folder, and I accidently made the header say "Final Fantasy VII" repeat for about a thousand lines. >.> Today it's just common mistakes, like forgetting a '>' or $.

My biggest mishap was not making a backup when altering a table in mysql.

Luckyly only 2 days of data lost, since then daily backups :)

Hmm.. I haven't really had any major admin mishaps that spring to mind.

On a couple of occasions, I've played around with some code or templates on my live forum and it shows an error for about 5 minutes until I fix it.. That's about it really. :)

luckly, im the same as oblivion.. thus far anyway
*knocks on wood*

Biggest error is misunderstanding a situation wrong and approaching it the wrong way due to that, losing data or whatever.

worse mishap was once a member deleted all his threads had to go through hundred threads and then bring it back...was awful.

I once tried to mod a style for a friend and totaled his website, erorr messeges flodding is inbox, the works, Yeah, he got pretty mad at me.

-.- I once accidentally changed all the permissions under one category so no one could post new threads or respond to their own threads. It was awful and I had no idea what I did wrong because I thought I was doing one thing when I actually did another. Whoops. It took me a few good days to figure that one out.

Once my fellow admin dropped the whole vB database... Luckily we had a backup but ever since he's been trying to keep aaway from phpMyAdmin :P

And only 2 days ago I made the worst I've done so far. It was on a windows dedicated server over Remote Desktop. I noticed that the windows firewall was off and for what ever reason, I turned it on. And of course, Remote Desktop wasn't on the exception list. Even worse, I was doign some work on the web server so that was offline too and the whole site was offline for a few days...

i recently accidently removed some code from one of my styles...... not remembering what it was was a bad point. i also accidently closed the boards for about 6 hours.... oops :)then u've got the classical uploading the wrong index.php file to the wrong directory and a few others :P