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Board upgrade complete (nearly!!)

Karlin

Administrator
Staff member
Hi folks:

Apologies for the long downtime yesterday; a programme I use to install updates to the board software failed to work on one upgrade and therefore my attempts to get the two upgrades needed failed. I tried to then undo the installs to see if I could get back to where we were but also realised I could just do a clean install of the latest software -- IF I could figure out how to reconnect to the old database and so on.

If worse came to worse I did have a recent board backup -- and for a while it was looking pretty scary -- just a tad over my head in other words! One of the recent upgrades was just incredibly complex, requiring several hours of work to install by hand, and dozens of files. I was very worried I'd miss just one bit of code and it would all go haywire (though as noted I had the backup anyway).

I went to bed at 3:30 this morning thinking through the options. This morning I started in again and did the clean install, which took some time as I always need to read everything -- which is several documents relating to different aspects of this process -- numerous times to be sure I felt able to do the task at hand.

I am delighted to say the board is more or less back and fully up to date now. I have to add back in some minor things -- a modification that auto-resizes avatars for example and the smilies aren't working at the moment but that can be fixed. The clean install of the latest full version of the board should make it run very smoothly. It is always better to work from fresh code than upgraded code! There's also an update coming out soon anyway so I am happoier to be starting with the latests fresh version and not something I have updated 9 times, which would have been the case. That's far more than anyone probably cares to know but someone might be interested in the details of my recent misery. :lol:

Hopefully I'll have done the rest of these things later today. :)

Karlin
 
I know what you mean Claire I missed it too !!!

Glad to have you all back.....

Thanks for all the work Karlin ....
 
Hmmm having problems installing a programme to auto resize avatars. If I can't get something owrking, I'll have to require resizes from people or have people upload their avatars and I'll store them on the site and resize myself. I'\ll let people know; in the meantime if you have an avatar that is now coming up really large, perhaps ypu can go resize it down on your host site to something not larger than about 2 inches in width or 120 pixels?
 
Thanks for all your hardwork Karlin, it's very much appreciated...don't know what we'd do without the board now :cry:
 
I'm sure you'd find more productive things to do! :lol:

I'm just glad to see it running again; there's nothing more dismal than just getting error messages and not knowing what is wrong.

I am working on getting the avatar resize sorted.
 
Adding my thanks too, Karlin for all of your hard work. Without people like you who willingly give up their time we would not be able to enjoy each other's company. :)
Thanks again Julie and the girls
 
We sure appreciate all your hard work, Karlin come on then we would
actually have to do housework. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
 
karlin--i've been admiring the new look of the upgrade. The graphics seem sharper. Is that just my imagination?

congratulations on getting through the bulk of it--what a big project! hats off to you for having the adventurous and creative spirit to take it on and make it through. hopefully you've been catching up on your sleep.
 
The avatars are sure a bit larger so that may make them look sharper. I also sharpened up the main pic on the home page myself -- took the opportunity to do some housekeeping I'd meant to do for ages.

One change you can see is that the board now tells you at top left what time it is and when your last visit was, which is a nice if small improvement.

What we are all waiting for is the long-awaited major upgrade of this software, version 3.0 (we are on 2.0.19 now). Version 3.0 promises sub-forums (which means subsections within forums, a much better way to organise the library for example so it isn;t just a list of topics). Plus some other new things. No date for release of it though.

This is open source software so you have to do pretty much everything yourself, but there are lots of add-ons etc. I have been looking for a nice template designs that would make the forum itself look a bit more polished but most of the templates are WAY too fussy and basically, designed by boys for the geek and gaming forums with all you might imagine that means. :roll: I looked at about 40 different templates last week and didn't like any of them. :lol: Some look good but the colours were not quite right -- made the forum a bit harder to read. As a lot of us saw age 20 some time ago, I tend to look for good readability not pale colours or black backgrounds or fussy elements that make forums hard to read. :)
 
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