ALL Inbox messages vanished

eldarth
eldarth Posts: 4,366 Arc User
Immediately after the migration, I checked my PM Inbox and had all my messages.

I just checked now and they are all gone and says my Inbox is completely empty. :'(

Comments

  • krittycat
    krittycat Posts: 4,187 Community Moderator
    eldarth wrote: »
    Immediately after the migration, I checked my PM Inbox and had all my messages.

    I just checked now and they are all gone and says my Inbox is completely empty. :'(


    That was intentional. PWE decided that the only way to avoid any private information being accessed would be to just delete all PMs from the migration.

    Vanilla doesn't use the same user division for PMs, so it based threads of PMs on the title. This led to everyone who had a message of, say, "Hey", to see every other message titled "Hey" by any other user on their particular forum.
  • eldarth
    eldarth Posts: 4,366 Arc User
    krittycat wrote: »
    That was intentional. PWE decided that the only way to avoid any private information being accessed would be to just delete all PMs from the migration.

    Vanilla doesn't use the same user division for PMs, so it based threads of PMs on the title. This led to everyone who had a message of, say, "Hey", to see every other message titled "Hey" by any other user on their particular forum.

    Wow. No warning or anything - so I just totally lost all my communication with Cryptic's Community Manager and developers? Nice. I certainly hope they are planning on fixing the problem and not simply destroying all our mail.

  • krittycat
    krittycat Posts: 4,187 Community Moderator
    eldarth wrote: »
    krittycat wrote: »
    That was intentional. PWE decided that the only way to avoid any private information being accessed would be to just delete all PMs from the migration.

    Vanilla doesn't use the same user division for PMs, so it based threads of PMs on the title. This led to everyone who had a message of, say, "Hey", to see every other message titled "Hey" by any other user on their particular forum.

    Wow. No warning or anything - so I just totally lost all my communication with Cryptic's Community Manager and developers? Nice. I certainly hope they are planning on fixing the problem and not simply destroying all our mail.


    The problem was limited to messages from before the migration. There should be no future issues.

    Also, you're not the only one who lost important messages - it was the only way to avoid privacy breaches that PWE had unexpectedly created.
  • ambisinisterr
    ambisinisterr Posts: 9,617 Community Moderator
    edited June 2015
    It was not avoidable and was not an expected cost of the migration.

    As krittycat said, a lot of private messages became shared with many other users because it combined all PM's of the same title. There was no way to resolve it because the basis of the problem is the difference between how VBullitin and Vanilla view PM's.

    I don't know if you have used any PM's yet but basically they are private threads (discussions). You can't "Blind Carbon Copy" anymore. It looks and behaves little different than this thread in function except on the left side it shows all the people who can view and write in the thread.

    And during the migration all PM's titled "Hey" were merged together and every person who had a PM titled "Hey" could read all of the private messages whether it was the "Hey" directed at them or not. There was no way to port them over and maintain the privacy so they opted to simply remove any PM's sent before the merger.
  • eldarth
    eldarth Posts: 4,366 Arc User
    edited June 2015
    And during the migration all PM's titled "Hey" were merged together and every person who had a PM titled "Hey" could read all of the private messages whether it was the "Hey" directed at them or not.
    This is called a bug.

    There was no way to port them over and maintain the privacy so they opted to simply remove any PM's sent before the merger.
    This is called a temporary fix to an unforeseen (very, very poorly tested) migration bug.

    The question is -- are they going to fix the problem and correctly migrate the PMs they have from the (backed up) source used for the forum migration? If they don't have anyone capable of solving it I would be glad to hold their hand and figure it out.

    And if they can't do that, perhaps they can collect the text of all our PMs and e-mail them to the e-mail account associated with the user.
  • ambisinisterr
    ambisinisterr Posts: 9,617 Community Moderator
    The answer is, again, it is/was not possible because the two systems were not compatible.

    As for your last sentence you will have to contact a CM because that is something nobody else can answer.
  • eldarth
    eldarth Posts: 4,366 Arc User
    The answer is, again, it is/was not possible because the two systems were not compatible./quote]

    It may have been outside their skill level, but both systems had/have private mail. While they may be structurally incompatible, they are both mail systems and therefore, I guarantee, it is absolutely 100% possible to migrate. If they care to make the effort as opposed to just middle-fingering their customers, that is entirely up to them.
  • frtoaster
    frtoaster Posts: 2,566 Arc User
    edited June 2015
    It was not avoidable and was not an expected cost of the migration.

    As krittycat said, a lot of private messages became shared with many other users because it combined all PM's of the same title. There was no way to resolve it because the basis of the problem is the difference between how VBullitin and Vanilla view PM's.
    The answer is, again, it is/was not possible because the two systems were not compatible.

    I kind of said this in another thread, but it isn't literally impossible. Presumably, they have the old messages backed up somewhere. They could reinsert each message as a separate conversation. If the message titles are a causing a merge problem, then simply move the message title into the body of the message in bold text.
    I don't know if you have used any PM's yet but basically they are private threads (discussions). You can't "Blind Carbon Copy" anymore. It looks and behaves little different than this thread in function except on the left side it shows all the people who can view and write in the thread.

    The way to achieve this is to create a separate conversation for each person that was BCC'd. For example, if person A sent a message to person B and BCC'd person C, then create one conversation for A and B and another for A and C.

    Of course, this requires writing custom code, and they may be unwilling to do that. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible. They might have used a generic export/import function to migrate the data instead of writing their own code. For example, they might have used this:

    http://docs.vanillaforums.com/developers/importing/

    That could explain how some PMs got merged and why old links are broken.
  • krittycat
    krittycat Posts: 4,187 Community Moderator
    edited June 2015
    eldarth wrote: »
    The answer is, again, it is/was not possible because the two systems were not compatible.

    It may have been outside their skill level, but both systems had/have private mail. While they may be structurally incompatible, they are both mail systems and therefore, I guarantee, it is absolutely 100% possible to migrate. If they care to make the effort as opposed to just middle-fingering their customers, that is entirely up to them.


    The systems do not support each other. The only way for them to migrate would be to do each message one at a time, as @frtoaster said - simply not commercially viable for the number of users on the forums.

    Otherwise, we would end up in the same situation - messages aren't divided properly, and they have to delete them again.
  • frtoaster
    frtoaster Posts: 2,566 Arc User
    krittycat wrote: »

    The systems do not support each other. The only way for them to migrate would be to do each message one at a time, as @frtoaster said - simply not commercially viable for the number of users on the forums.

    Otherwise, we would end up in the same situation - messages aren't divided properly, and they have to delete them again.

    I'm not sure what you mean by "not commercially viable". Are you saying that it would cost too much because there are too many users, or are you saying that there are too few users for it to be worth their time? I doubt the costs would be substantially different whether they had 10,000 users or a million users. It's largely a matter of programmer time. Writing code to copy over old PMs and to fix old links is well within the capabilities of an experienced server-side web programmer. Now, maybe, PWE can't afford to assign one of their programmers to this task, but then the problem is a shortage of staff, not the technical infeasibility of the task in question.
  • krittycat
    krittycat Posts: 4,187 Community Moderator
    edited June 2015
    frtoaster wrote: »
    krittycat wrote: »

    The systems do not support each other. The only way for them to migrate would be to do each message one at a time, as @frtoaster said - simply not commercially viable for the number of users on the forums.

    Otherwise, we would end up in the same situation - messages aren't divided properly, and they have to delete them again.

    I'm not sure what you mean by "not commercially viable". Are you saying that it would cost too much because there are too many users, or are you saying that there are too few users for it to be worth their time? I doubt the costs would be substantially different whether they had 10,000 users or a million users. It's largely a matter of programmer time. Writing code to copy over old PMs and to fix old links is well within the capabilities of an experienced server-side web programmer. Now, maybe, PWE can't afford to assign one of their programmers to this task, but then the problem is a shortage of staff, not the technical infeasibility of the task in question.


    If you haven't noticed, the staff of PWE has actually grown considerably smaller (just take a look at how many CMs have parted ways recently). That means that the people they have are set on tasks, and to take anyone off those tasks to work on something like PMs is a considerable delay on whatever else they may have been working on.

    It's not commercially viable because those other tasks won't be getting done, thus setting the whole department behind, which just leads to a massive snowball of delays, and then nobody is happy.

    EDIT: Also, a lot of the tasks related to getting the forums set up are being delegated back to Vanilla to take care of, so I can imagine that PWE isn't really all that experienced with the Vanilla software.
  • frtoaster
    frtoaster Posts: 2,566 Arc User
    edited June 2015
    krittycat wrote: »
    If you haven't noticed, the staff of PWE has actually grown considerably smaller (just take a look at how many CMs have parted ways recently). That means that the people they have are set on tasks, and to take anyone off those tasks to work on something like PMs is a considerable delay on whatever else they may have been working on.

    It's not commercially viable because those other tasks won't be getting done, thus setting the whole department behind, which just leads to a massive snowball of delays, and then nobody is happy.

    EDIT: Also, a lot of the tasks related to getting the forums set up are being delegated back to Vanilla to take care of, so I can imagine that PWE isn't really all that experienced with the Vanilla software.

    No doubt you are correct that Vanilla Forums is handling many of the tasks that were previously handled in-house. If this forum migration were solely about all the great features of Vanilla's software, then PWE could have simply downloaded the software and run it on their own servers. Since the software is open-source, they wouldn't have to pay Vanilla Forums a penny. They also wouldn't have to deal with the problems that arise from trying to integrate content from one domain into another, and they wouldn't have to worry about the privacy issues that arise from sharing customer data with another company. So why outsource the forums at all? Probably to reduce the number of staff assigned to maintaining them.

    If the financial cost of qualified technical staff is what's prohibiting them from fixing certain problems, then they shouldn't claim otherwise. PWE should stop claiming that certain things are technically infeasible, when some of us know better. I'm tired of exaggerated claims about the difficulty of routine programming tasks. Technical infeasibility should not be conflated with financial cost. If they don't want to fix something, then a statement to the effect of "This is not something we plan to fix" will suffice.
  • flyingfinn
    flyingfinn Posts: 6,694 Arc User
    edited June 2015
    Oh thank you very much for deleting all my mails. And without a warning.
    You know PWE, your whole forum migration is a big effing pile of bulldung. But money saved is money earned....
    I lost some important mails and some way back from 2009. Thanks a lot.
    Keep up the good work. I mean it. Really i do.
    Hope your company lasts a long time and makes the guy upstairs wealthy.

    Can you atleast clear the effin new message numbers in my Inbox out of it?

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  • eldarth
    eldarth Posts: 4,366 Arc User
    frtoaster wrote: »
    PWE should stop claiming that certain things are technically infeasible, when some of us know better. I'm tired of exaggerated claims about the difficulty of routine programming tasks. Technical infeasibility should not be conflated with financial cost. If they don't want to fix something, then a statement to the effect of "This is not something we plan to fix" will suffice.

    Wildly exaggerated seems to be the norm. Given the data requirements I could easily write a Perl script in a day that would migrate the PMs. Hardly a backbreaking schedule impact.
  • frtoaster
    frtoaster Posts: 2,566 Arc User
    eldarth wrote: »
    And if they can't do that, perhaps they can collect the text of all our PMs and e-mail them to the e-mail account associated with the user.
    Incidentally, vBulletin provides the ability to download your private messages in three formats: ASCII, CSV, and XML. I know this because I downloaded all my PMs before the forum migration. Maybe, they can use this function to download each user's messages and email the data to him or her. Of course, that would also require writing a program or script. Alternatively, they can temporarily bring the old forums back up somewhere so that users can download their PMs. They wouldn't have to make the threads or posts available, only the PMs.
  • krittycat
    krittycat Posts: 4,187 Community Moderator
    frtoaster wrote: »
    eldarth wrote: »
    And if they can't do that, perhaps they can collect the text of all our PMs and e-mail them to the e-mail account associated with the user.
    Incidentally, vBulletin provides the ability to download your private messages in three formats: ASCII, CSV, and XML. I know this because I downloaded all my PMs before the forum migration. Maybe, they can use this function to download each user's messages and email the data to him or her. Of course, that would also require writing a program or script. Alternatively, they can temporarily bring the old forums back up somewhere so that users can download their PMs. They wouldn't have to make the threads or posts available, only the PMs.


    Maybe just have users send in tickets if they want copies of their PMs - there are plenty of people who have moved on or couldn't care less about their old PMs, and taking the time to send the data to them would be, in essence, a waste of manpower.
  • eldarth
    eldarth Posts: 4,366 Arc User
    krittycat wrote: »
    Maybe just have users send in tickets if they want copies of their PMs - there are plenty of people who have moved on or couldn't care less about their old PMs, and taking the time to send the data to them would be, in essence, a waste of manpower.[/color]

    So..you think having customer service reps handle e-mail requests and submit task requests to individually harvest a persons old PMs and e-mail it to them is LESS manpower than simply running a script that took a half a day to create and having all that done automatically? normal-32.gif
  • krittycat
    krittycat Posts: 4,187 Community Moderator
    edited June 2015
    eldarth wrote: »
    krittycat wrote: »
    Maybe just have users send in tickets if they want copies of their PMs - there are plenty of people who have moved on or couldn't care less about their old PMs, and taking the time to send the data to them would be, in essence, a waste of manpower.[/color]

    So..you think having customer service reps handle e-mail requests and submit task requests to individually harvest a persons old PMs and e-mail it to them is LESS manpower than simply running a script that took a half a day to create and having all that done automatically? normal-32.gif


    I'm not sure what you're not getting about "These guys don't know the softwares". Heck, they barely did anything with vB - they broke it 4 years ago when they released an update on the Rising Tide expansion of PWI, and never could figure out what they did.

    So you think having them migrate information from a forum software they didn't understand well to a forum software they haven't the slightest clue about is a good idea?

    Just saying...

    EDIT: I also think you're over-estimating the number of people who actually care about some of their older messages. I've seen 3 or 4 posts about it - nobody really seems that upset. They understand that PWE did what they had to do to protect user privacy, and moved on.

    So far, you're the only one who created an entire thread about it.tiger-39.gif
  • frtoaster
    frtoaster Posts: 2,566 Arc User
    edited June 2015
    krittycat wrote: »

    Maybe just have users send in tickets if they want copies of their PMs - there are plenty of people who have moved on or couldn't care less about their old PMs, and taking the time to send the data to them would be, in essence, a waste of manpower.
    eldarth wrote: »
    So..you think having customer service reps handle e-mail requests and submit task requests to individually harvest a persons old PMs and e-mail it to them is LESS manpower than simply running a script that took a half a day to create and having all that done automatically? normal-32.gif

    I have never gotten PWE customer support to help me with anything that required a member of their technical staff to do. They seem to have generic customer support, but no actual technical support. Every time, they give me the runaround asking me perform generic steps that I know won't help. Even after I perform said steps and specifically ask for help from technical support, they won't do it. The end result is that they tell me, sorry, there is nothing they can do.

    For me, this issue is not about getting my old PMs back. As I said, I already have my old PMs. For me, the issue is substandard workmanship. Not fixing old links is another sign of poor workmanship. Krittycat, I'm sorry if you don't like my criticism of PWE. But if I think they have done a poor job, I will say so.
    Post edited by frtoaster on
  • krittycat
    krittycat Posts: 4,187 Community Moderator
    edited June 2015
    frtoaster wrote: »
    krittycat wrote: »
    Maybe just have users send in tickets if they want copies of their PMs - there are plenty of people who have moved on or couldn't care less about their old PMs, and taking the time to send the data to them would be, in essence, a waste of manpower.[/color]
    eldarth wrote: »
    So..you think having customer service reps handle e-mail requests and submit task requests to individually harvest a persons old PMs and e-mail it to them is LESS manpower than simply running a script that took a half a day to create and having all that done automatically? normal-32.gif

    I have never gotten PWE customer support to help me with anything that required a member of their technical staff to do. They seem to have generic customer support, but no actual technical support. Every time, they give me the runaround asking me perform generic steps that I know won't help. Even after I perform said steps and specifically asking for help from technical support, they won't do it. The end result is that they tell me, sorry, there is nothing they can do.

    For me, this issue is not about getting my old PMs back. As I said, I already have my old PMs. For me, the issue is substandard workmanship. Not fixing old links is another sign of poor workmanship. Krittycat, I'm sorry if you don't like my criticism of PWE. But if I think they have done a poor job, I will say so.


    I'm not offended. On many occasions, I've been one of the harshest critics of PWE; however, I've also been talking to various staff members, and they're all telling me the same thing: All of their attention right now is focused on getting the forums up and running optimally as soon as possible. The quickest way to deal with the PM issue was to delete the PMs - incompatibility wasn't going to allow them to just be migrated, and personal information was there that shouldn't have been public

    Was it the only solution? No. Was it the best solution at the time? Yes.

    I'm with you guys - I believe things could have been done differently IF they had the time to do so - but they simply don't. All of their community people are working full-time combing the threads with issues and finding issues of their own, so they can submit them to Vanilla for fixes.

    Do I like how things are going? Not fully. Communication is lacking, and some of the undocumented changes are unnerving. Do I understand why it's happening? Yes. Short-staffed as they are, they only have so many man-hours in a day. They're prioritizing issues and solving them as they can. Give them time to work through the issues in turn, from high-priority (like exploits and bugs that reveal private information) to low priority (restoring minor functions, visual updates on the forums, etc.).
  • frtoaster
    frtoaster Posts: 2,566 Arc User
    krittycat wrote: »

    I'm not sure what you're not getting about "These guys don't know the softwares". Heck, they barely did anything with vB - they broke it 4 years ago when they released an update on the Rising Tide expansion of PWI, and never could figure out what they did.

    So you think having them migrate information from a forum software they didn't understand well to a forum software they haven't the slightest clue about is a good idea?

    Just saying...
    I think the main problem is that they thought the conversion could be done by someone who didn't understand the software in the first place. I'm not really criticizing Trendy or trailturtle. They might have done the best job that they could given the circumstances. But their bosses should have understood that a data migration like this requires someone to analyze and understand the differences between vBulletin's and Vanilla's data models.
    krittycat wrote: »

    I'm not offended. On many occasions, I've been one of the harshest critics of PWE; however, I've also been talking to various staff members, and they're all telling me the same thing: All of their attention right now is focused on getting the forums up and running optimally as soon as possible. The quickest way to deal with the PM issue was to delete the PMs - incompatibility wasn't going to allow them to just be migrated, and personal information was there that shouldn't have been public

    Was it the only solution? No. Was it the best solution at the time? Yes.

    I'm with you guys - I believe things could have been done differently IF they had the time to do so - but they simply don't. All of their community people are working full-time combing the threads with issues and finding issues of their own, so they can submit them to Vanilla for fixes.

    Do I like how things are going? Not fully. Communication is lacking, and some of the undocumented changes are unnerving. Do I understand why it's happening? Yes. Short-staffed as they are, they only have so many man-hours in a day. They're prioritizing issues and solving them as they can. Give them time to work through the issues in turn, from high-priority (like exploits and bugs that reveal private information) to low priority (restoring minor functions, visual updates on the forums, etc.).
    I think they rushed the forum migration with minimal planning and testing. They delayed it a few weeks, but that probably wasn't enough. The differences between vBulletin's and Vanilla's data models should have been investigated and planned for in advance. The data migration code should have been tested on a sample of the data before doing a full migration. All this should have happened before they even announced the forum migration. If they wait until after release to fix everything, then of course they'll have no time.

    The differences between vBulletin and Vanilla aren't as big an obstacle as some people are making it out to be. PWE is not the first company to face such an issue. Companies convert from one system to another all the time, even in the face of unfamiliar and poorly documented code. Basically, I'm saying that they didn't do their homework, and that's what bothers me more than any individual bug.
  • ovenusarmanio
    ovenusarmanio Posts: 301 Community Moderator
    edited June 2015
    This has actually been in the works a long time, not just a few weeks. And they apparently did resolve a number of issues beforehand. I doubt even if they had done more work, they'd have known the PM thing. But I do agree that they moved this up too fast, they pretty obviously did this too soon. To say I'm frustrated by when and how they moved this would be the wrong word. But a moderator shouldn't use the kind of language I really feel about it. I'm furious at how they did it. Nevertheless, it's done. I think how they've done it for now is the right call given the circumstances. Hindsight is 20/20. What matters is they are working on fixes now, and are prioritizing the right things IMO. I wish I still had the PMs that were deleted, but I understand they had bigger and more important fish to fry. I'm glad they are focusing on that. The other issues are way more important. If someday way down the line they could get us our mails back though, through a ticket, that would be cool. If not, well I'm glad they prioritized the right mistakes to fix. Sometimes you can't fix them all.

    I would like an apology though, once this is all over. I'm still angry how that went down initially.

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