Alakajam! is in a temporary read-only mode 0 0

On March 10th, at around 1am a fire started at a site of our hosting provider, which includes Alakajam's server. While we wait for the hosting company to resolve the issue (which is planned to take up to next Monday), we have set up this Alakajam install, from our last backup, on a completely new machine.

On top of this incident, we have made the mistake of not setting up automatic off-site backups for Alakajam. As you can see from the game submissions being missing from the site, our last backup was made before the 11th Alakajam week-end. We don't know for sure whether data has been lost in the fire or not, so in the meantime we chose to freeze the website.

Note: in the picture, Alakajam is somewhere in the small building on the right of the burning one. As it turns out, virtual servers are… not that virtual. (14/03 EDIT: In the end we turned out to be in the fully burnt building)

About 11th Alakajam's rating phase

Here's our current plans for next week:

• Plan A: We recover the game submissions & ratings. If so we'll restore the up-to-date version of the site, everything goes back to normal, and we'll give an additional week to end the ratings phase normally.
• Plan B: If data really is lost, we'll reopen BOTH entry submissions and ratings, for long enough to let everyone jump back aboard and re-cast ratings to the games they played.

Thanks for your understanding. Let this be a lesson for us all to never underestimate backups!