Forum down time


pam
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At 11 p.m. tonight (mst), an attempt will be made to do another update to the forums.  We are hoping this will be a very easy and quick update.  But as we all know, the unexpected can happen. 

So be prepared for some down time tonight...anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours.  It really just depends on how well it goes.

 

 

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Hi,

Site Tech here.

There are a lot of improvements and bug fixes in this patch. I don't write the software, I only administer it, so, all I can do right now is quote the changelog:

Quote

More consistent visual feedback when a post submit or edit is processing to reduce duplicates.

So, in short, yes, we hope to see fewer duplicates.

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3 hours ago, rpframe said:

Hi,

Site Tech here.

There are a lot of improvements and bug fixes in this patch. I don't write the software, I only administer it, so, all I can do right now is quote the changelog:

So, in short, yes, we hope to see fewer duplicates.

Perhaps you guys should try XenForo, made by the ex-vBulletin team.

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18 minutes ago, Awakened said:

Perhaps you guys should try XenForo, made by the ex-vBulletin team.

Yeah, I would vote for considering switching to different forum software. There are lots of good free ones out there, I believe. Besides the double posts, there is always an annoying lag that last several minutes when I post something.

Besides, then you could hide the politics forum (after you made a politics-only forum) :cool:

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15 minutes ago, tesuji said:

Yeah, I would vote for considering switching to different forum software. There are lots of good free ones out there, I believe. Besides the double posts, there is always an annoying lag that last several minutes when I post something.

Besides, then you could hide the politics forum (after you made a politics-only forum) :cool:

We're not going to be hiding any politics forum.   But you are right.  The lag time is atrocious at times.

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8 hours ago, rpframe said:

Hi,

Site Tech here.

There are a lot of improvements and bug fixes in this patch. I don't write the software, I only administer it, so, all I can do right now is quote the changelog:

So, in short, yes, we hope to see fewer duplicates.

Wow, I read that as changling. And thought how awful to call someone that. 

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7 hours ago, Awakened said:

Perhaps you guys should try XenForo, made by the ex-vBulletin team.

We used vBulletin before, it has its own issues. Not real excited about anything more from them.

Additionally, there are a lot of other concerns we worry about. Such as keeping the millions of posts we already have in here. Its not quite as simple as just installing new software most of the time.

6 hours ago, tesuji said:

Yeah, I would vote for considering switching to different forum software. There are lots of good free ones out there, I believe. Besides the double posts, there is always an annoying lag that last several minutes when I post something.

We have recently upgraded our database to help alleviate some of this. But I agree it can still take a while. SQL doesn't like it much when you have multi gigabyte databases. The search index alone for this thing is 700MB. 

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9 minutes ago, rpframe said:

We used vBulletin before, it has its own issues. Not real excited about anything more from them.

Additionally, there are a lot of other concerns we worry about. Such as keeping the millions of posts we already have in here. Its not quite as simple as just installing new software most of the time.

We have recently upgraded our database to help alleviate some of this. But I agree it can still take a while. SQL doesn't like it much when you have multi gigabyte databases. The search index alone for this thing is 700MB. 

Wait... vBulletin 4 or vBulletin 5? Because 5 wasn't made by the original team and sucks big time. Like... Really big. I have personally seen it. 4 was partly made by them and is widely considered to be the last vBulletin that was really great. It's showing its age though sadly despite how good it is even today.

Edited by Awakened
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3 minutes ago, Awakened said:

Wait... vBulletin 4 or vBulletin 5? Because 5 wasn't made by the original team and sucks big time. Like... Really big. 4 was partly made by them and is widely considered to be the last vBulletin that was really good. It's showing its age though sadly despite how good it is, even today.

Either way, we have a lot of things to consider when choosing software. Presently we are going to continue forward with invisionpower. There are a lot of bugfixes and improvements coming with this update. Hope it alleviates a few concerns.

The latest major version that we are using was built from the ground up. So it definitely has bugs. But they are actively working on fixing them.

And boy let me tell you, the backend of the old version was a complete disaster.

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15 minutes ago, rpframe said:

Either way, we have a lot of things to consider when choosing software. Presently we are going to continue forward with invisionpower. There are a lot of bugfixes and improvements coming with this update. Hope it alleviates a few concerns.

The latest major version that we are using was built from the ground up. So it definitely has bugs. But they are actively working on fixing them.

And boy let me tell you, the backend of the old version was a complete disaster.

Wow. XD Don't envy you guys. But yeah, thank you for the work you guys do. I really appreciate this forum and it needs to stick around.

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Okay so, various issues came up that I can't go into for site security reasons.

No posts were lost in this attempt, but we are not updated yet.

Will contact the software developers to get some answers about a few things, and will try again in a few days (depending on how prompt they are about responding).

Thanks for your patience.

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19 hours ago, rpframe said:

So, in short, yes, we hope to see fewer duplicates.

But I liked the duplicates.:D

15 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

Grateful for the site.   Grateful for the team that makes it work.  Grateful for the people who fund the site.

Double ditto to this post!!!  (and apparently triple exclamation points).

Edited by Guest
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11 hours ago, rpframe said:

Additionally, there are a lot of other concerns we worry about. Such as keeping the millions of posts we already have in here. Its not quite as simple as just installing new software most of the time.

We have recently upgraded our database to help alleviate some of this. But I agree it can still take a while. SQL doesn't like it much when you have multi gigabyte databases. The search index alone for this thing is 700MB. 

I want to believe there is a technical fix. I assume you have looked into it.

I have to wonder, though, if there isn't a way.

SQL Server really doesn't have a workaround for the 700MB problem?

Or, maybe keep this current sit as a Google'able, read-only archive somehow, and start a brand new site, using the same BB software if you want.

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On 8/10/2016 at 10:57 AM, tesuji said:

SQL Server really doesn't have a workaround for the 700MB problem?

Or, maybe keep this current sit as a Google'able, read-only archive somehow, and start a brand new site, using the same BB software if you want.

More recent versions of MySQL better handle large tables but... in the end you are still just writing to a single file. And when that file contains rows numbering in the millions, and multiple people are trying to write to it, it can be slow. To help alleviate this, we switched to using Amazon Aurora, which has definitely helped.

We consider the many many posts in this forum to be valuable. If we ditch all the current posts and/or archive them, they no longer are all searchable in one place.

I hope that one day the software will make archived posts searchable (such that new posts update quickly, but old posts are still searchable), but that is presently not the case. 
(for those that care there is a whole thread about this in the software forums)

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