Upgrades etc.

[wimg]

Dearest Members and Visitors of the Fountain Pen Nuthouse,

 

Checking and testing upgrades.

 

As indicated a few months ago, we need to do a few upgrades to the forum and underlying software still, and we are also looking into solutions for the Classifieds section of the forum.

 

The good news is that we are working on checking and testing the latest upgrades, forum, 3rd party and system versions, and we will very likely apply those sometime in the next 10 tot 14 days. We will make an official announcement as always.

As to a Classifieds replacement, we are working on this as well, and hope we can implement that at the same time, but we cannot make promises as yet. If the different software options we are exploring do not work, we will implement at least a temporary forum-style solution, however, so we can finally continue with classifieds type of support. There are currently 3 alternatives we are exploring, 4 if you include a forum option, so hopefully we will find a good solution very quickly.

 

Speak to you all very soon about this!

 

Warm regards,

on behalf of The FPN Moderator and Admin Team,

Wim

 

[inkstainedruth]

Thank you for all the work you guys are doing, and for keeping the rest of us updated.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Sailor Kenshin]

Amen!  Could this upgrade be why the forum is running a little slow, and why I can't edit my profile?  
 

Thanks.  💝

[corniche]

Hi Wim, et al,

 

Yes, thanks for the updates. I also have noticed my profile cannot be changed, either.

 

One thing, if it's at all possible, I wish you'd reconsider the use of the term "followers" in the former "Friends" category.

 

I think "friend" is a MUCH NICER term than "follower." People don't want to be "followers," but they do like to be thought of as "friends." 

 

At least that's the way I feel about it.

 

- Sean

[essayfaire]

Are the upgrades why I'v been getting server not found/unable to connect to server messages this evening?  Thanks for all your hard work.

[wimg]

13 hours ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

Amen!  Could this upgrade be why the forum is running a little slow, and why I can't edit my profile?  
 

Thanks.  💝

Yes, in a way. This is caused by some changes in the database with the last upgrade, which causes the creation of the test database to require significantly more resources.

Once they are created, all should be back to normal again. Unfortunately it takes a lot of time to create a new set, and we have to do this, because the old sets were not migrated when we moved to the new server. Made no sense anyway, because it was outdated.

 

There may well be a way around this, at least partly, but it requires some tampering and potentially slowing down FPN for much longer, so I will not do that on the main machine until I have been able to test it on our test sites.

 

Warm regards, WIm

[wimg]

14 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

Thank you for all the work you guys are doing, and for keeping the rest of us updated.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

Thank you, Ruth! Much appreciated!

 

Warm regards, WIm

[wimg]

11 hours ago, corniche said:

Hi Wim, et al,

 

Yes, thanks for the updates. I also have noticed my profile cannot be changed, either.

 

One thing, if it's at all possible, I wish you'd reconsider the use of the term "followers" in the former "Friends" category.

 

I think "friend" is a MUCH NICER term than "follower." People don't want to be "followers," but they do like to be thought of as "friends." 

 

At least that's the way I feel about it.

 

- Sean

Hi Sean,

 

Thank you!

 

As to the friends/followers thing: I totally agree, but that is baked into the software I am afraid, so I can't really change that, without making updates very difficult. I did mention this to the developers, and others too, when this was implemented, but to no avail. They wanted to be more trendy, it seems, and make it more like social media.

 

Fortunately, some of the stuff was parameterized, so we could disable that with settings, but this isn't one of them.

 

HTH, warm regards, Wim

[wimg]

9 hours ago, essayfaire said:

Are the upgrades why I'v been getting server not found/unable to connect to server messages this evening?  Thanks for all your hard work.

Yes, see my message to Sailor Kenshin. One particular table now takes up half of the database, but before trying to cut it down, I do need to do some testing on what is possible in that regard, without causing any problems with FPN itself.

Copying this table takes a huge amount of resources and time currently, but there is no way around this unfortunately.

 

Anyway, once there is a copy, and the test site runs, I can start experimenting on this table to see what the possibilties are. It looks like this was the main reason for the site to grow a lot slower over the last month anyway.

 

HTH, warm regards, Wim

[Sailor Kenshin]

It all sounds so complicated!  Thanks, and best of luck.  😃

[wimg]

5 minutes ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

It all sounds so complicated!  Thanks, and best of luck.  😃

😂

 

Yeah, well, I did all the research quite a few years ago on how to do all this anyway, even wrote a manual for it, and keep updating it when the software and all else evolves. I basically wrote a process script for the purpose of creating a test site form an existing forum site like FPN, and in principle I only have to follow the steps, which I mostly know by heart apart form the approximately 500 SQL-statements to be executed, unless a problem appears due to the next change that has not yet been catered for

 

That particular table was one of those. Took me about 36 hours, though, to figure out how to get around it, but that was mostly because it takes so much time to try and copy it at 7.2 GB for that single table with lots of complex indexes .... You may have noticed, however, that the site does run a little faster currently, despite me being busy copying it ...

 

Warm regards, WIm

[mhguda]

Yes, the site seems much faster again today, for which I will say Thank You Very Very Much.

Also, thank you for all the work keeping this home on the net running for all of us. A bit of sanity in a crazy world, sometimes.

All the effort is much appreciated.

 

[wimg]

Thank you kindly, mhguda!

 

Your kind remarks are much appreciated!

 

Warm regards< Wim

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, wimg said:

😂

 

Yeah, well, I did all the research quite a few years ago on how to do all this anyway, even wrote a manual for it, and keep updating it when the software and all else evolves. I basically wrote a process script for the purpose of creating a test site form an existing forum site like FPN, and in principle I only have to follow the steps, which I mostly know by heart apart form the approximately 500 SQL-statements to be executed, unless a problem appears due to the next change that has not yet been catered for

 

That particular table was one of those. Took me about 36 hours, though, to figure out how to get around it, but that was mostly because it takes so much time to try and copy it at 7.2 GB for that single table with lots of complex indexes .... You may have noticed, however, that the site does run a little faster currently, despite me being busy copying it ...

 

Warm regards, WIm

Amazing! You're our hero, Wim!  Wishing you all the best in this and all your endeavors!

[wimg]

1 hour ago, LizEF said:

Amazing! You're our hero, Wim!  Wishing you all the best in this and all your endeavors!

You make me blush, Liz ...

Thank you, regardless!

 

Warm regards, Wim

[LizEF]

48 minutes ago, wimg said:

You make me blush, Liz ...

Thank you, regardless!

 

Warm regards, Wim

  Hey, we're FPN addicts, so, the guy who keeps things going here, and improves them, is our hero.  You've earned my gratitude, and I know I'm not the only one.

[JohnUphill]

Thanks for your efforts to keep this running. Though I rarely post, this forum helps me maintain a sense of connection in a fragmented world.

[I-am-not-really-here]

Periodically I eat my cookie and this time coincidentally occurred at the same time as "the slowness."  What's with the two-factor authentication requirement (fortunately with an opt-out!) to log in?  

[wimg]

1 hour ago, I-am-not-really-here said:

Periodically I eat my cookie and this time coincidentally occurred at the same time as "the slowness."  What's with the two-factor authentication requirement (fortunately with an opt-out!) to log in?  

That is new, and optional, if you feel the need to protect your account more. We switched it on after the migration, as there were quite a few hackers active on the forum.

 

HTH, warm regards, Wim

[Doug C]

23 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

Thank you for all the work you guys are doing, and for keeping the rest of us updated.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

+1