Beginning January 19th, Dreamhost, the service which hosts this forum, will be upgrading all forums to the latest version of PHP, the software on which this forum runs. In addition, there we anticipate some other changes ahead on the technical side at Dreamhost.
There is a good chance this will take the board offline for some period of time. Could be extended. That’s not SUPPOSED to happen, but:
For years now, we’ve been aware of a problem with the database associated with the forum. (As forums go, it’s a very large database and an old one. This board has been running here for 15 years.) None of your moderators have the expertise to track this problem down and fix it. It has been responsible for some of the glitches over recent years when the forums are slow-loading or don’t work at all. For reasons that remain unclear to me, Dreamhost does not offer the kind of tech support we need for this.
We have looked, at various times, to moving the forum to a service that specializes in PHP boards and manage the technical side. I own the forum and pay for the hosting service. That cost to me is offset by the Google ad banners. Moving to a specialized hosting service would cost more than I am able to pay.
The upgrade could go fine. If not–and the board goes offline–I will reconfigure things so that forums.chiffandfipple.com will automatically direct visitors to a website I’ll have prepared to provide updates about attempts to get things running again.
Thanks. Hope to see you on the other side of this!
Moving to a specialized hosting service would cost more than I am able to pay.
Your efforts are truly appreciated for what you, and other moderators, have done to make this service available to our community. What are the costs, and are they within reach of crowd-source donations or a subscription fee for some of us to help with?
If the size of the database is a problem, can you consider cutting off the 67% of the posts/pages with the fewest views. I am sure the best quality information is contained in the pages with the highest portion of views. I don’t know how that would be done with the current database version but surely there are scripts that could cure database bloat.
I for one am quite concerned about the potential loss of this Board. It would be a huge loss for a vast number of persons, and I really don’t know of anything that would take it’s place. Dale you have performed a wonderful service for many years, thank you for all of your efforts, time and money. I have certainly taken advantage, and have appreciated the information which has so freely been shared, and has been so helpful, from so many persons who have been very knowledgeable and willing to help people out who are looking for some answers to vexing questions regarding a wide variety of issues. And the persons using this board are very kind/polite, almost all of the time. It only seems right that those who have reaped so much enjoyment and benefit from the board ought to be able to pay back in some fashion. Please advise as to how members can assist.
As for the older postings, for every question I’ve posted on this board, I’ll bet I’ve found the answer by searching old posts 50 times as often. So I’m all in favor of them being kept. I just wish the old Coolboard archive was still available.
I’m wondering the same. A few hours back I got a 504 Timeout, but that didn’t last long at all - a few seconds or so - and things overall have seemed nicely responsive since. So, on the basis of that, I would hazard a cautious “Looks like it.”