We messed up.

Big time.

We lost some tables in our main database, and discovered that our nightly backup was not taking a complete dump of all the tables.

I won't bore you with the details, but the bottom line is we've lost:

• All votes, ever. -- [update] These have been recreated!
• All member usernames who registered later than around 12 months ago
• All member rankings
• Your member profile info (e.g., bio, favorite sift, etc.), if any
• All activity that happened on the site March 11

If you feel bad about this, believe it that we feel 100 times worse. We're putting into place measures to ensure that this can never happen again.

For the short term, we're declaring martial sift law across the community and deputized the top 40 sifters of all time to help fix things. The list of deputies is as follows:

zifnab
dystopianfuturetoday
kronosposeidon
arvana
eric3579
blankfist
ant
netrunner
farhad2000
mintbbb
mlx
issykitty
fedquip
dotdude
maatc
firefly
rasch187
deputydog
silvercord
zonbie
theaceofclubz
swampgirl
plastiquemonkey
winkler1
krupo
grimm
dw1117
sarzy
joedirt
therealblankman
oxdottir
sometimes
marinegunrock
youdiejoe
dead_tofu
rickegee
kulpims
fissionchips
alien_concept
michie

All user accounts still exist, but for most of them the username and other account details (email address, star points, etc.) are unknown. However, the account is still associated with your posts (videos, sift talk, comments, etc.). So we've set all unknown usernames to a simple number until we can identify them.

If you are a user whose account has become some unknown number, please re-register with your original username. Then find one of your posts or comments to determine your temporary username number and post it in a comment here to have a deputy or admin fix your account.

We beseech you to stay calm during this crisis and trust that we're doing everything we can to bring the Sift back into a semblance of order.

We're sorry. Darwin bless VideoSift.

[edit]
For the time being, queued videos will not be expired to your pqueue by siftbot since they are a couple days old now and have zero votes.

[edit]
A good way to start repopulating things you know you voted on would be to go through all the videos you've added to your own playlists. Also check out the new "oldest medals" listing on the Top Sifts tab for a listing of just videos that have earned "top 15" medals.

We are automatically casting votes for every user on every video they've submitted so you don't have to do all those yourself.

[edit]
NOTE: You will not have to start sifting from scratch. After your username is fixed, all your old videos and star points will be applied to you as before.