Hi All,
As Oliver Kohl explained in this post, SCN had a technical issue in the Sunday/Monday time frame that caused actions performed by members on SCN not to be recorded in our back-end systems, including the points system.
Fortunately, none of the actual activities that took place on SCN were lost. In other words, if you created a blog or document during the time period in question, your blog or document is still there (unless it was hidden or deleted through moderation); if you had a thread reply marked Helpful or Correct, that Helpful or Correct marking is still there (assuming the OP or a moderator did not remove it for other reasons); and if some of your content was rated or liked, that rating or like is still reflected on the content.
Unfortunately, the points for those things are a different story. The points were not recorded in the back-end system during this specific time frame, and this is not something that can be fixed or reversed by our technical folks. This applies to both points that members would have gained through content creation or positive feedback, as well as points that members would have lost through content deletion or rejection or through reversal of positive feedback.
The scope of the actions lost is not entirely clear, because there was an existing queue of point-earning and point-reducing actions at the time the systems were restarted. Without those actions from the queue and the actions from the shutdown time being recorded, we have no transparent, equitable way to ensure that everyone who should have earned points in this situation did so and that everyone who should have lost points did so. Trying to award points manually to resolve this discrepancy would be complex, time-consuming (for both members and our support team), and inconsistent at best.
For this reason, we feel it is in the best interest of the community and most fair to everyone across the board if we treat this as the one-time, unexpected glitch that it was and move forward without trying to recover the points that were lost or removing the points that should have been lost. We apologize for the situation and are taking steps to ensure this sort of thing cannot happen again. It happened to all of us who are active here in one form or another, including members of the SCN Team.
So we ask for your understanding and support in this situation. In the end, after all, participating and contributing in the community is not first and foremost about the points. It's about sharing knowledge and expertise, and being recognized for them, and neither of those things was affected in this situation. Any content you created is still there, and the feedback it received is also still there.
Thanks for your cooperation, and we will strive to ensure this situation is not repeated.