Forum Changes

[zamb]

Yea a few glitches still, like new posts takes you to search, but i guess those will be ironed out in time

[Faust]

Strange, everything works for me.

[zamb]

Strange, everything works for me.

seems to be working better and Faster now.....

[coup de grace]

A slightly more detailed version of what happened and we're going to do moving forward --

(tl;dr Hosting a large forum is hard.)

We've been running the same version of vBulletin (VB3, save for a handful of security patches and performance optimizations) for a while now. Our hosting provider recently upgraded the version of PHP on our server which caused an incompatibility between vBulletin and the database connection layer. Rather than trying to patch vBulletin or downgrade PHP, I made the (hasty) decision to upgrade vBulletin to the most recent version, 5. That turned out to be a huge mistake, since VB5 has a number of performance and customization problems. We limped along for a few days while I talked to a couple of contractors about trying to get things stable on VB5, but the consensus was that we needed to downgrade to VB4.

So, we had to revert all the way back to VB3 (and a snapshot of the database that was taken immediately prior to the upgrade, which is why we lost the interim posts, mea culpa), patch the site to deal with the database connectivity issues, and downgrade PHP, all of which was not trivial for reasons that are not very interesting. In any case, we're now back where we started.

Moving forward, we'll upgrade to VB4 which has a bunch of performance improvements and useful features, but we'll do it in a sane way that doesn't take down the board for a week. In the mean time, if you run into any issues you can DM me or post here.



@dji: Those memory errors should have stopped as of yesterday afternoon EST.

@zamb: There were some residual issues with search that should be resolved as of yesterday afternoon.

[mrbeuys]

Thanks a lot, cdg, for the no doubt infuriatingly hard work on this. Been there, done that and it wasn't pretty either.

[Geoffrey B. Small]

Yes, absolutely- many many thanks cdg for getting the forum back up, greatly appreciated.

[Mezeinee]

Have threads of the last few weeks been deleted somehow?
I was going to look into a thread I started (about how I got kicked out of Darklands) and it doesn't exist anymore.
Can anyone tell me what's happened?

[ian+]

Have threads of the last few weeks been deleted somehow?
I was going to look into a thread I started (about how I got kicked out of Darklands) and it doesn't exist anymore.
Can anyone tell me what's happened?

...So, we had to revert all the way back to VB3 (and a snapshot of the database that was taken immediately prior to the upgrade, which is why we lost the interim posts, mea culpa)...

Feel free to post your experience again, preferably in the Retailers thread.

[Faust]

SZ will be down for maintenance tonight. Tomorrow we are coming with a brand new shining website for both the forum and the magazine. Hold tight!

[Faust]

Hi everyone. If you have trouble logging in to the upgraded forum, please restart your browser.
Also, file your feedback here while we are in the growing pains mode.

[eloquent]

Is the search working? It doesn't seem to be working for me.

[radio-aktivität]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mhn2tidccspbhds/sz1.png?dl=0

there’s a quick navigation width error here

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rsrz3cdjr3rj4tm/sz2.png?dl=0

and here I would suggest a touch of "letter-spacing: 0.05em;"


the rest looks VERY fine so far! :) did you guys think of monochromizing the vBulletin icons?

[Crowzer]

This is really nice !

[Faust]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mhn2tidccspbhds/sz1.png?dl=0
there’s a quick navigation width error here

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rsrz3cdjr3rj4tm/sz2.png?dl=0

and here I would suggest a touch of "letter-spacing: 0.05em;"


the rest looks VERY fine so far! :) did you guys think of monochromizing the vBulletin icons?

That would be really nice. Not sure if we can.

[eleves]

Love the new look for everything! Very refreshing for sure