A couple of weeks ago, while travelling overseas, I was contacted by a regular MENZ visitor and told the comments were no longer accessible. After wasting a couple of hours testing the wrong things yesterday, I finally checked the comments admin page and discovered that all comments had been deleted from the database. I have no idea how this happened.

EDIT NEXT DAY: It turns out the comments database table had crashed, and once I found the place to tick the box and select “repair table”, all 47,353 comments have reappeared! And the backups are working again.

No comments showing in database

This is the point where a good webmaster reaches for his backup. But to my shame and humiliation it appears my backup solution wasn’t working. Since I retired a few years ago, I have not paid as much attention to detail as I should have. So it seems unlikely the comments will be returning.

The Wayback Machine

Many posts and pages from MENZ have been preserved at the Internet Archive. Snapshots up to 9th July include comments.

Future of MENZ

I’ve been thinking for some time that it is probably time to retire the blog section of this site, and shift everything from WordPress to static HTML, which requires no maintenance and is not a security concern.

I’ll leave the New Post function working for the next few weeks in case any of the long-time contributors to the site want to say goodbye, or make any last statements.