Database Clean-Up (with some collateral damage)

Guys,

I'm sorry to report that any ratings / reviews / and lists posted yesterday are gone. We had to revert back to our backup db that was updated through Monday at 1AM.

Here's what happened:

A long time ago, we set up our system so that non registered users could rate and review things. These reviews would not post live on the site until the person registered, but we had to save user information about EVERYBODY - registered or not.

Well we quickly realized that people found this system confusing, so we scrapped it. However, we did not scrap the process that "remembered" anonymous users. So every day, we were accumulating thousands of these "anon" users in our database, that were just taking up space.

So as of yesterday, we were up to MILLIONS of lines in our database of worthless anon info. We kept putting it off, and putting it off, because a clean up of this magnitude is a big exercise.

RateItAll's CTO last night made the call that it was time to clean this stuff up. In the process of removing all of these anon listings, there was a problem with the db. We were forced to go back to Monday morning's backup (this is why we do backups every single day).

The good news is that all of those ANON listings are out. The bad news is that we lost a day's worth of data.

We're making a concerted effort to get our technology in order, to make the site faster and better. This was a very unfortunate side effect, of an initiative that in the long term will improve site experience.