Scheduled service on forum November 23-24

[Jim Eshelman]

The weekend of Saturday-Sunday November 23-24 (possibly to include Friday night 11/22), the forum will be unavailable at different times.

We are planning a move to new servers November 30. I need to upgrade the software before we can do this. The upgrades will have the site down at times.

Don't worry if you can't get here during that time.

I will remove this notice when the work is finished.

[Jim Eshelman]

Today I will begin prep for upgrade. This involves removing styles (things that give the forum its distinctive look), so you may notice things looking different. I will also disconnect some of the extra features such as the Moon phase marker, birthday list, collapsible forum categories, external links opening in new windows automatically, and gender settings. These will come back later if all goes well).

So today, things might look different enough to grab your attention.

I may do the whole project today or may do the biggest part (that will have the forum unavailable for a while) tomorrow. My considerations are (1) if I do it today, I have it all done and have tomorrow to fix it if anything goes wrong and (2) my new Demi-SLR tomorrow says everything I do tomorrow will make me happy. - I'll figure it out.

In the worst case - the unlikely chance that this blows the whole forum up beyond recoverability - it's been wonderful knowing all of you

[SteveS]

Same here JIM if a "blow-up"--- its been great learning from you and other members .

[Jim Eshelman]

Problems ... then problems solved for now.

We are not updated. The update failed for unknown reasons. But (with a bit of a struggle) I got the old one restored.

Next step is for me to troubleshoot this. I probably will start from scratch and see if it works the second try. I've been studying error logs, Mike V has given some useful opinions of the error logs, I've spent hours on the phone with the web host's support team.

But I have to get this updated or else it will cease to work permanently on November 30 when they move Solunars.com to a new generation of web server where the current software won't work. So I'll be back at it in the morning and you'll see it offline for a few more hours. (If it's off hours for a few days instead of a few hours, please don't worry. Give me until November 30 to get this solved before you worry.)

[Veronica]

It has been wonderful hasn’t it……

Venus should be on spot to be especially pleasant today.
I have been working on updating my catalog of books in LibraryThing (KnightSkye is my collections name ) and it has just been a pleasure doing catalog work and organizing all these books I saved from the rubbish. Only about 1k left to do today, which I shouldn’t have a problem unless Mother Nature gives us our first snow fall of the season, in which I would have to go out for a good silly romp in the wet mushy stuff.

I have complete confidence in you and am not worried at all. If there is anything we can do to make this happen and go smoothly please let us know. Have a most beautiful day in every way….

Oh ps…..
Today I am activating a brand new phone, getting a new number and everything. I have had communication problems with my last phone, and thought long and hard about when would be the best time for me to activate this one to try and ensure the best, most positive and loving and successful experience…..I looked at charts through out the morning and evening and thought that the setting Venus time was better then the rising or mid time. So hopefully tonight I too will be all upgraded and set up for good communication!

[Jim Eshelman]

Starting the project again any minute now. Rather than retrace my steps, I'm using an alternate method.

[Jim Eshelman]

It worked! We're back. Now on version 3.3.14 instead of 3.2.0.

I have a lot of work to do before this is fully polished and all the old cool touches are back, but the big hurdle is over. We're back!

[Veronica]

Woohoo! Hazzah!!
So glad that went well!

[Jim Eshelman]

I planned to take this thread down as soon as I was done, but "done" is a relative term - and it might do to have a place to update you on what's going on for a couple of days.

The software update worked. We're now running on the newest version of phpBB (just released Wednesday).

I've added some plug-ins that give us some extra features. I was looking forward to adding a few more (that turned out to be outmoded and didn't work on the new stuff). I've updated the look slightly. If you used some Style other than the default board Style (see your user control panel), I think all the old ones are back. I now have several more I want to test.

The administrative control panel has a hundred or so individual details I'm going through line by line, that will take a while.

I've installed a new security system that is supposed to keep known spammers and malicious posters from reaching the site. If that works, it will let me ease up on some of the other less-effective filtering and security methods. I hope it doesn't keep out anyone that I actually mean to get here. (I found one problem that kept anyone not logged in from reaching the site unless you REALLY knew what you were doing. I fixed that.)

More to come.