What's been going on with the website?

[administrator]

We've had a few technical issues going on this week with the website that I think are addressed for now. As you may have noticed we are now on a new version of vBulletin software. Basically I found that our webhost was running newer software that the old forum software couldn't handle correctly. So you will notice a different look to the website but functionally should basically be the same. If you are experiencing problems, let me know.

I have also done a bit of purging to the system. You will definitely notice that post counts have dropped quite a bit in the Classified Forums, as well as the Off Topic Forums. I needed to shrink the database size down because it was getting a bit excessive. I also got rid of users that haven't been on the website for over a year. So if you haven't been in the forum for over a year and you can't log in, then that's why. Just create a new account and you'll be rockin'. That comes with the usual disclaimer thar if you register for an account and you never receive the email from us accepting you, and it isn't in your Spam folder, then most likely your email server is blocking email from us. In that case then unfortunately you will need to get another email account with someone else.

Hopefully, with all these tweaks and changes things will cause things to work a bit smoother and faster. Happy New Year!

Frank

[administrator]

As a lot of you may have noticed the forum spent most of today (12/31) down. The latest I am dealing with is a bunch of issues related to the new forum software and our forum database. It appears to be a caused by poor database tweaking by vBulletin in their upgrade scripts. This is causing a ton errors on the backend.

With the old vBulletin v5 I was also seeing a lot of PHP coding errors with it. This is what was causing our disk full and database corruption problems.

I have tried making copies of the database and massaging them by hand but so far it hasn't worked. A big problem I have is when the database has to be restored it is taking 6-7 hours to do so.

So I have support calls into vBulletin to get the database straightened out and tickets to our webhost to see why it takes so long for a database restore to happen. I'll try to make sure that backups are done often but there is still a chance that posts and PM's will get lost while we hammer this thing out. So be patient. I hope to have this fixed soon. I am trying to minimize the losses but the only way to guarantee things from not being lost is by totally shutting down the forum until all the issues are resolved. This could take days and I'm sure no one wants things shut down that long.