[Steve_PPP]

SES will be offline on Sunday 30th December to make some improvements to the database. We'll be starting work about 9am (with coffee in hand!) and hope to have everything sorted by about 1-2pm.

When the new Admin team emailed all members back in September, we said:

We have managed to recover a stable version of the database which contains the threads lost when the previous Admin team encountered problems and rolled back (threads dated May 2011 - June 2012). We *hope* to be able to merge these back into the live SES database.

We've been working on this behind the scenes and have managed to successfully merge the current live SES database with the missing data in an offline test forum. The Admin and Moderator team have been testing this to make sure everything is working OK over the last week and we're happy to now repeat the process on the Live forum. If everything goes to plan, then all missing posts will be restored and available. As part of the recent testing, we discovered the amount of lost data - 4,294 threads and 44,375 posts. I don't think any of us realised how much had gone but it'll certainly be great to have this missing data back in the forum and searchable again. We'll be taking a backup of everything before we start so if anything does go wrong, we'll just roll back.

Most members will also notice their post count increase, as the forum will recalculate them based on the restored data