Well....

How to start this thread now.... well... thats not easy....
do I start it with technical information or with personal opinion?

I guess I start it with a "what the fuck do people think this is supposed to be here?".
Yes, there have been technical problems on the server... but that is no reason to spam the forum... to spam my chat... to react in such a respectless way here.
The people that cried loudest are the ones which had the least reason to do so.

Do you think it is fun to get disturbed every 5mins while working on the server? It is not... it made the situation worse and I am pretty pissed about that.
This week (and we are pretty close to its end) I had to read only one good comment here on the forum. Let me quote it.

Quote from Portalearth

I got some advice for situations like this"Don't panic"

A candle in the dark... Thank you.

I am not quiet sure why some people here think that their priorities have to be my priorities. In more than 13 years that Ive been running FL servers Ive always done my job. I dont need reminders on this... I dont need people telling me what I have to do... and I dont need people with disturb my work every few minutes by telling me the obvious on the chat.

There is a bug tracker... we have such a feature here for a good reason.
One more thing you might need to get into your head.... I am doing my work when I have time for it... not when you request/demand it.

But hey, since we are at it lets talk about what happened.

Earlier this week there was a problem with the server where players couldnt connect. I was "kindly" pointed to that problem here on the forum (not on the bug tracker) when I actually was at work.
Putting aside that this should not have been my priority at that time I investigated and located a possible source. That allowed players to join the server again.
Fact however is that during the entire day the Global List Server (the server that allows players to connect to FL servers) was bugged. ALL FL servers were affected and players couldnt join the connected servers. CF at this time was working again due to a bypass function we have in the mod.
Later people reported that they got banned (also not reported on the bug tracker). Reason were ship related cheats.
At this point I can only speculate but my best guess is that these people were trying to access the server while the GLS was bugged and this damaged their chars somehow. I simply dont have any other explanation for these kinds of problems.
There was a handful of chars which had exactly the same ship related cheat message in the logs. Accounts which connected after I applied the changes on the server didnt seem to be affected.
Of course I was asked to fix the chars (again not on the bug tracker).

Let me at this point explain to you what a char looks like.
A char has hundreds if not thousands lines of code. Each line represents a setting, a weapon, a cargo item.. a location you have visited... a NPC... etc. All of these lines are encoded.
Fixing a char means to decode all these lines and then comparing each line with the mod in order to check if they are valid or not.
Simply said... fixing one char is a task you would be able to do in 1-2 weeks, if you hurry. A reason why I never would want to do that.

There were two options remaining. Using backups of the chars or running an automatic repair tool that most FL servers have.
Using backups would have been nice... unfortunatly did the GLS problem start in the middle of the daily backup process. With other words the latest backups were damaged.
This was leaving the auto-repair tool as only remaining option.
I guess the reports about missing chars earlier today were result of this auto-repair. Dunno, in over 8 years that this tool exists I never ran it.
Fact is that once started you have little control over what it tries to fix. Most likely this tool found something in those chars that it didnt agree with and did "corrections" which eventually prevented that these chars could be read by the server.
In the end it does not even matter what it did. Fact is that char files stopped working and fixing chars by hand is nearly impossible (especially if you dont really know how many and which files are affected).
It could mean that the try to fix a handful of chars damaged hundreds if not thousands of other chars.

Did I already mention that having working backups would have been nice?
To sum it up... what happened is an unfortunate chain reaction. What I am to blame for (and I mean it this way) is that I didnt say "bugged char, well thats bad luck" yesterday.
Ive spent the past 10 hours to minimize the damages and to close the chat spam.
There is a secondary backup cycle on the server... one that was not damaged... one that reaches back exactly 14 days.
To minimize the losses I have restored only the "missing" chars from that backup.
Chars which were not damaged at all (not by the GLS incident and not by the auto-repair) should still be on the server and are fully functional.
Chars which were damaged (lost) due to the auto-repair should be reset to the state of the secondary backup. Thats better than nothing.
Chars which trigger ship related cheats are most likely still bugged. If they are younger than 14 days these chars are lost (bad luck -> Im not going to try another repair). If they are older than 14 days then there is still the option to restore an older version of that char from the secondary backups (requests for such a restoration should be posted to the bug tracker).

More is not to say about the events of the past days.

Yes the clan bases are still offline... and no comment on the forum will change this. The deactivated server features will get enabled again when Huor gives his ok for it (not when you request it or complain about it being offline).

When I started this thread I originally wanted to say more about the stuff that personally bothers me... mainly about how demanding certain people are without giving any support back.
Meanwhile I think that would be wasted time.
Its end of May already.... and so far I can say that never before (as long this community exists) Ive been that demotivated when visiting this place. Its the first year that I really question what I am doing here.