PM Sent Box empty

As anyone here should know we have been working on a new version of A2K for a couple of years now. We'd long maintained that we'd launch without avatars and PMs and add them later but because we missed our own deadlines so many times we'd recently decided to include PMs as a surprise at launch, which we estimate is weeks away.

In preparation for the creation of an improved data structure for the messaging (we wanted to do stuff like tie messages together in conversations so they can be viewed in groups) I was preparing the current database for conversion to a new database structure.

The first thing I wanted to do was clean up any garbage the current software leaves behind. Things like "orphan" messages that through db errors or code mistakes are left on the database but not connected to any user.

I used some open-source code to achieve this and found out after the fact that the author of the code considers the forums' "sent" messages to be unnecessary and included those in the deletion. The reasoning of the code's author is that the data is duplicated and a inbox and sent copy are both stored, making one unnecessary.

While I agree that the data structure is wasteful and would normalize it a bit more in this case I disagree with the code's author and the code's effect because while the messages still exist on the recipient's side they are not accessible from the sender's side anymore.

To fix this on the current platform would require downtime of the entire site or at least the private message portion of it while we try to merge datasets and would delay our new version even further.

So what I've decided to do is return to our initial schedule where we launch PMs after launching the new forums and when we do so we'll regenerate all the data from the recipient's inboxes (we were going to toss out the two-copy structure anyway and use a separate table to track deletion between multiple recipients).

So in short, this is not a security breach (except in that I ran code that did more than I expected), it's not related to anyone's pms (and no PMs outside of the sentbox were affected so all PMs sent are still sent, you just don't have a sent copy), and we are going to delay the new site's PM service in order to restore the sent copy feature in a new data structure.

In the interests of full disclosure, there is still a small possibility of permanent loss of your sent copy if your recipient deletes their copy. Since we are going to regenerate your sent copy off the recipient dataset if they delete your message we won't be able to restore this to your sent box when we move the database to the new platform. I expect that to be rare and affect fewer than 1% of the messages and we'll restore sent copy access to the rest of them as we build the new messaging feature.

Sorry if this causes any inconvenience in the mean time.