Well it seems like some ill-meaning pranksters have been commenting on behalf of RC mods and admins and direct communication with beerguy has refuted the comments that were made and had this to say instead:
Someone who doesn’t want us competing with them fabricated those messages.
We did have a database issue but since we’re one of the few boards that does a nightly backup will be back later this morning, with almost zero data loss.
We are relieved to hear that Reef Central should be back online shortly and we sincerely regret to have been a part of this misinformation. Our comment system does not require for emails to be verified but it just goes to show that it is a sad fact that unless comments are verified and re-verified, it is impossible to believe what statements are made anymore. We sincerely apologize to the RC staff and RC users and we will do our best to be doubly diligent with information in the future.
Update: Posted over on Reef Central:
To the folks spreading rumors and making up quotes, it’s pretty sad when you have to resort to lying to try and get members.
The truth is that during an upgrade to mySQL we encountered an error that needed to be corrected. Unlike most sites, our database is very large and routine checks can take quite a long time to run. That’s one of the reasons why we’re one of the few sites that runs a full nightly backup. We’ll be back this morning with virtually zero data loss. Sorry to disappoint the folks forging the emails.
Update 2: Reef Central is back up.
Regardless of what rumor you’ve heard, we’re still here. We still have our database and we weren’t hacked.
If you’ve been paying attention to some of the talk about the board, we’ve been planning an upgrade for some time. On our archive site, the work is already complete and that has been our test site.
Yesterday, as a preliminary step to the upgrade, we upgraded our database software. The update fleshed out some table inconsistencies that the previous software version overlooked. Once those issues were resolved we had to update some SQL code because of a change in the way that some statements were being parsed by the new version.
Right now Searching has been disabled because that table is very large and it impeded checks that needed to be run. It’ll be returned to service as soon as things stabilize.
Thanks
