Thanks to Pokey for her 2nd donation!

Moments after's yesterday's plea for continued support from our members, Pokey donated for the second time; her first time was just two months ago.

Because of her contribution, Pokey's karma has been bumped up 20 points!

Thanks again Pokey!

Reminder: RAF is run on your donations!

Hey guys,

When's the last time you saw a blog post thanking members for their donations? Hard to remember, right? Well, that's because the last time a donation was received was Pokey's over a month ago.

So in case you didn't know, or forgot, Richard's Animorphs Forum depends on donations by our users to be run. As I've pointed out in the past:

Here are a list of common expenses:

1. Domains: 7 domains are currently paid for and being run under RAF. 
2. Servers: 2 shared servers are used by RAF. Server /host related costs fluctuate. We are charged for backups for instance. 
3. Software: RAF from time to time purchases software for users to use, or for development purposes. 
4. Advertising: a forum without members is not a forum after all. I use paid services to promote RAF. This is the biggest expense outside of regular expenses.

In case you're wondering if there are any perks for donors; you're in luck:
There are three tiers based on how much you donate (you know, reward those more who donate more)

1. If you donate less than $10:
"Donor"
Your account will reflect 9 Stars, enjoy all the privileges of the "God" Rank and your account will be able to store 1000 personal messages. You'll be credited 10 karma points and you'll have access to D-Lounge. This member position will only last for 6 months.

2. If you donate more than $10, but less than $50:
"Silver Donor"
In addition to the above, your account will have 10 stars, and you'll be credited 20 karma points. This position will last for 1 year.




3. If you donate more than $50:
"Gold Donor"
In addition to the above, your account will have 11 stars, your color changes to gold, you'll be able to store unlimited personal messages (for you chatter-boxes), when you view the forum there will be no advertisements, and you'll have all these privileges forever.


So what are you waiting for? Visit RAF Donate or just click on the donate link below!:

Massive Data Loss Prompts RAF Restore

Call it RAFpocalypse, or call it the Massive RAF Restore, but today May 26, 2011 marks the first time in our history that the forum had to be restored using a five day old backup.

So here is what happened: in the evening of May 26, I begin going through the forum, making incremental changes; one of these changes was an option to prune the forum. I often prune the forum every month or so, or whenever I have the time. By pruning, I mean removing "moved topic notices". But one of the options was to remove "all posts" prior to 7 days that are deemed inactive. This latter option was the one I inadvertently selected versus deleting "moved topic notices" made prior to 7 days.

By doing this pruning, all posts were removed that were not posted in 7 days.

This left RAF with a total of 200,000+ posts and a 200+ topics.

Having noticed what had taken place, and knowing there was no "undo" to this action (deleting posts actually deletes them, forever) I immediately contacted our host (HostGator) in an attempt to get a server copy of the forum's database.

HostGator makes a backup of all files and databases on their servers every Saturday. Unfortunately for us, Saturday last was 5 days ago. They restored the database in 10 minutes.

So in the blink of an eye, RAF lost thousands of posts, hundreds of personal messages, countless profile edits, karma updates; everything made since May 21, 2011. Even members who registered after May 21, 2011 will have to do so again.

This massive time travel will make RPGs awkward, conversations in Personal Messages weird, and certainly will make history recording spotty. It's a crippling blow, but I hope we can move past it.

Again, I would like to apologize to EVERYONE who is affected by this.

Regards,

Richard

Emails going to spam?

Quick question: have our notification emails been going to your spam/junk folders lately? Or have you been receiving them without a problem?

Click here to let me know.

RAF's 8th Birthday & 600,000 posts!

Yesterday May 23, 2011 marked Richard's Animorphs Forum 8th official year since I opened the gates in 2003. Amazing huh? That means that as of today, we're in our 9th year; yes NINTH year!

Last year we had a party to celebrate, but to be honest, I kinda forgot (a bit under the weather lately), and nothing was finalized for our 8th year celebrations. But hey, we'll definitely have a RAF Party soon to catch up for missed time.
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On another note... we passed 600,000 posts today May 24, 2011. Another amazing statistic for another amazing animorphs community that moved just 3 years ago to SMF.

Thank you to all our RAFians for making RAF the crazy, cool place it is; oh and The Ultimate Animorphs Forum.

Video of KA Applegate Answering Animorphs Questions

A few days ago, Scholastic posted the below video on YouTube which shows Animorphs author Kathrine Applegate answering 5 questions. See it below: