Sorry about all the post spam from otters_raft, I fixed a cronjob that wasn't running and things seem to have gone a little haywire. We're trying to clean them all up and figure out what happened

Apologies yall!

We're not sure what happened but Otter's raft evolved rapidly from a TETH to WAW and HE class in a split second

Us: "What the..why is 2nd trumpet playing?
**Checks feed** AHH

...anyways, after swift assembly to stations:

The admin team has successfully contained the abnormality @otters_raft@lemmy.ca. We are now in postmortum stage and are examining the subject to understand what happened.

Otter has also been advised to consider getting a canoe for now. I don't think it'll go wild...probably.

Otter has my condolences. Make sure their family is contacted.

Very sorry for my part in that spam wave.

I've tried scheduling a lot of posts since launch, and never deleted them since I figured they failed to post. I guess once the cronjob was adjusted and @otters_raft@piefed.ca saw that the gate was open, it decided to ransack the place...

Thank you to the other admins for dealing with that mess!

Thank you, I will pass along your message as we spray purifying gamer girl bathwater onto the raft at the shrine🙏

Sigh, this is fixed properly now.

For the curious: We didn't have the send_queue cronjob enabled, so scheduled messages weren't sent out when they were supposed to. Piefed seems to have a bug where the cron is enabled way in the future, it spams those old scheduled messages regularly.

As for why the struggle fixing it... this is embarrassing but I was looking at the wrong database. Last week I copied our "pyfedi" db to "pyfedi_utf" as part of correcting a problem with the db character encoding. I've been applying changes to the "pyfedi" db to fix this, instead of the "pyfedi_utf" database.

Lesson learned - clean up the old database once you know the new one is good.