The Wrong Folder Event was a data loss event that occurred during late November 2013, resulting in a massive loss of VaultWiki development progress.
Shortly after the release of VaultWiki v4.0.0 Beta 7, a decline in the number of new bug reports gave developers the time to implement some new Admin Panel features and refactor related code, which took roughly one month. During this time, the developer Admin Panel code was kept in a separate directory with a similar name to the live code. When refactoring was complete, Ted Phillips attempted to remove the live code and rename the folder with the developer code to take its place. However, something went wrong and the developer code was deleted instead. At the time, VaultWiki developers used a custom version control system for released code only, so the data was lost.
For years, Ted Phillips remembered this event being related to 6 months of upgrade system or content fetching code, but there is no record or other evidence of such an event. It is more likely that those recollections are related to displeasure of evolving program requirements that might have led to rewriting large portions of code that had already been recently rewritten.
Few records exist pertaining to the purpose of the refactor involved in the Wrong Folder Event, changes involved, or the event itself. One theory is that some changes were intended to improve Admin Panel integration with the XenForo platform, which had been added as a supported platform only a few months earlier. It is believed that whatever change was attempted was completely abandoned, at least until the VaultWiki 4.1.x series, which did achieve closer platform integration within the Admin Panel.
The only evidence that this event occurred are an atypical gap between versions 4.0.0 Beta 7 and 4.0.0 Gamma 1, compared to other contemporary gaps, and a blog post where Ted explained the reasoning for implementing better version control:[1]
Shortly after the release of VaultWiki v4.0.0 Beta 7, a decline in the number of new bug reports gave developers the time to implement some new Admin Panel features and refactor related code, which took roughly one month. During this time, the developer Admin Panel code was kept in a separate directory with a similar name to the live code. When refactoring was complete, Ted Phillips attempted to remove the live code and rename the folder with the developer code to take its place. However, something went wrong and the developer code was deleted instead. At the time, VaultWiki developers used a custom version control system for released code only, so the data was lost.
For years, Ted Phillips remembered this event being related to 6 months of upgrade system or content fetching code, but there is no record or other evidence of such an event. It is more likely that those recollections are related to displeasure of evolving program requirements that might have led to rewriting large portions of code that had already been recently rewritten.
Few records exist pertaining to the purpose of the refactor involved in the Wrong Folder Event, changes involved, or the event itself. One theory is that some changes were intended to improve Admin Panel integration with the XenForo platform, which had been added as a supported platform only a few months earlier. It is believed that whatever change was attempted was completely abandoned, at least until the VaultWiki 4.1.x series, which did achieve closer platform integration within the Admin Panel.
The only evidence that this event occurred are an atypical gap between versions 4.0.0 Beta 7 and 4.0.0 Gamma 1, compared to other contemporary gaps, and a blog post where Ted explained the reasoning for implementing better version control:[1]
Ted Phillips said:
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