Well I guess it was multiple critical failures that left the server off.

1st the power must have gone out
2nd the power must have gone out while the server was loading back into windows
3rd then the server booted to the screen that asks you if you want to go into safe mode and it froze there with 0 seconds left on the timer.

So really it shouldn't happen again unless 3 unlikely things align again.

Ok, carry on!

wow, i was wondering what happened.

the main webserver didn't go down, was that on a UPS of some sort?

they are both on the same UPS so who knows.

ALSO: No longer is every possible user name disallowed for registration. Somebody, in an attempt to ban usernames with symbols in them made a ban list like this:
*!*, *#*, *^*, ***...

oh like that crashed the server.

i did that because we had bots registering on our forum with names like that that contained HTML code. since they had symbols in them i couldn't delete the user.

I just didn't want to make a new post about it. The point is that a friend was trying to register and said it wouldn't take any name at all. I looked around and found '***' in the ban list. I thought it was funny cause you just went down the keyboard. I would have forgotten *** would catch-all too.

heh, well when i set up this forum i didn't know much about php or html so i was just being "careful". i have learned a lot since then.