Dear planet hunters. First let me start off by saying that its fantastic to see the planetometer getting so high, it constantly impresses me how much work the planet hunters community has done and continues to do each day. We worked it out recently and the community is the equivalent of 51 full times employees constantly working on the site!
We take the work you do very seriously and try to make sure that none of your time and clicks on the site are wasted. We make sure that every night the entire database of your classifications on every one of our sites is backed up. We rarely have to use these backups and have only had to resort to them twice, once was after the big outage of amazon web services about a month back and the other was last week on the 28 of June. While trying to look at some of your data and prepare it for the science team I accidentally issued a command to the database that the live site uses rather than the copy of that database I have on my machine. The result was not good and we had to restore the database from the pervious nights back up meaning we lost any classifications that where made between the backup and my error. This was a terrible thing to happen and I cant apologise enough to the people who lost classifications.
Thankfully we only lost about 4 hours of classifications between 6:40 am and 10:40 am (uk time) which is a quiet time for the site. Hopefully this means that most of our users will have been snugly in bed or getting ready for work so I hope the damage was minimal. Even still we always try and learn from our mistakes so that they dont happen again in future.
As always, we value your continued hard work and effort.
Thanks
Stuart