FORUM UPGRADE: 12/25-26

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

  FYI: I received the following PM from ProBoards' support staff this morning --

Dear Forum Administrator,

I am writing this message to inform you of an upcoming upgrade, and subsequent downtime, for your message board. A detailed list of these changes can be found under this message.

In order to apply this upgrade, your forum will enter a period of downtime. The downtime will only last from the moment your forum begins to upgrade to when it is done. Any other forums that will be upgrading on the same server as your forum will not cause downtime for yours.

The upgrade process will occur sometime between the evening of December 25th and morning December 26th. We do not expect even the largest of forums to be offline for more than 3 hours.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me at ProBoards Support via PM's. I have linked my name further down to my profile so you can easily find me.

Regards,
Martyn Dale
ProBoards.com Operations


V4.5 Features

New thread sort options
	Order by subject
	Thread creator
	Replies
	Views
	Post order
In EITHER direction

Revamped poll system with many new options
	Ability to select multiple answers
	Auto locking polls at a given time
	Ability to hide results until users have voted/poll is locked
	Ability to retract votes
	
New subboard permissions
	Ability to have all subboard posts appear in its parent board
	The ability to hide the above mentioned subboards
	
Vastly improved speed on post and member searchs
	1,000 member limit for top posters has been removed
	All users can now be displayed in post order, irrespective of forum size
	Member lists can be sorted in any order
	Search speeds increased dramatically
	
	
Listing of all users online over the entire day

Calendar entries displayed at the bottom of the page are now in date order

Gradients can be automatically generated for your forums colors

Ability to add a poll to an existing thread

Ability to set default listing order to a board

Ability to request a forgotten password by email address has been restored

Character limit in posts and PM's has been in been increased from 25,000 to 60,000

Category access can now be granted based on membergroup and/or post count related ranks

Improved page jump, decreasing load times on large boards/threads/member lists

Other server side performance tweaks

Other small software fixes (eg "on Today" now displays as just "Today")

  This shouldn't have any major impact on our forum, but I wanted you to be aware of it. If there are any minor problems with existing forum scripts, I'll try to get them fixed as soon as possible after the upgrade has been completed. Thank you for your patience -- and have a merry Christmas!

    Jeff / Peace-=Of-God=-

[Missionary-=Of-God=-]

i guess this is as good place as any.... i lost 430 pms and the prayer & praises board is gone ... thats what i have noticed so far. will they come back with original content?

[Dancer-=Of-God=-]

Dec 26, 2007 10:24:00 GMT -5 Missionary-=Of-God=- said:

i guess this is as good place as any.... i lost 430 pms and the prayer & praises board is gone ... thats what i have noticed so far. will they come back with original content?

Let's hope there's a back-up somewhere that can restore this. -- Bible Study section is empty as well.

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

  I've posted a message regarding this in the ProBoards Support forum ... hopefully they'll be able to restore those boards.

  In the meantime ... if you find any other problems, please report them here. Thanks!

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

Got a reply on that from Craig Suffolk at PB Support:

Hi,

We still have the data, however, it will need to be reconverted. We will do this for you tonight. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Craig

  Be sure to let me know here if you find any other problems. Thanks again for your patience with this!

[Goodness]

They restore the board ,thanks for that.
Peace (Jeff) can do almost everything guy's .
What can i say .
Have a little faith .
Over the years, I've seen it all and don't know anything he can't,you can ask him everything .
He will help you or know some guy(or girl) that can.

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

  Thanks, Danny, I appreciate your confidence (misguided though it might be ;D). I wouldn't say that I can fix everything ... but I do know who to contact when I don't know how to fix something .

  BTW, here's the official response from ProBoards' Martyn Dale regarding the missing board issue:

Sorry about that, the boards were in fact converted, just for an odd reason the forum decided no one could access them (better security went a little stop happy than letting someone in right?)

Either way, i have fixed the issue, and everything popped stright up right away

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

  Marson, they're also looking for info on the missing PM's ... were they in your Inbox or your Outbox?

[Missionary-=Of-God=-]

they were in the inbox.... most of them were not really important but there were a couple that i would like to keep..... i promise to clean out the stuff if i get them back.

all the outbox stuff looks like it is still there

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

"clean out the stuff"? I currently have nearly 3800 PM's in my Inbox -- wanna come clean out mine too?

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

Got a reply back from Craig Suffolk for you, Marson:

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply. That person only had 2 PMs in their inbox pre upgrade

Most likely, you accidentally hit that pesky little button in the Inbox ... I've done that a couple of times -- that thing is a dangerous PM-killing machine .

[Missionary-=Of-God=-]

thanks for checking into it for me... but, i had 400. i had a couple browsers open to the og forums so after the update, i alt-tabbed into one of the old ones and they were there (at the top of the screen in the notification line). but, no big deal.... i guess i dont have to clean my room after all

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

  FYI: Latest info on the update from Martyn Dale:

While the performance improvements were made to the server, an issue was discovered in the user activity logs.

In order to keep the server running effectively, these features have been temporarily disabled. This will result in the users online today, and users currently online areas to be empty.

This was done as an immediate resolution to the slow loading, and TMC messages.

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

  FYI: Here's the latest info on the upgrade problems, as posted by Martyn Dale over the last two hours at the ProBoards Support Forum:

Jan 11, 2008 17:02:22 GMT -5 @martyn said:

First, I would like to apologize for the continued problems with the server.

This server runs the same software and hardware as server 48 and runs fine, as you can tell. This has made it increasingly difficult to trace problems.

In order to allow for a "normal" visiting experience (with regards to the most important functions, viewing and making posts etc), functions that create the initial issue (which in turn cause the too many connections errors) have been disabled.

These functions are only related to searches.

During this time everything else should be as fast as you are used to.

As adapted code is brought online, these features will return one by one.

Please keep discussions relating to server 48 to this thread for ease of keeping track of issues.

Also, please only make use of this thread if you are a server 48 user. There is no need for others to take part in this thread.

As for an estimated time for fixes, I don’t plan on going to sleep until this problem is resolved. Based on that, the problems should not extend past today.

Jan 11, 2008 18:20:20 GMT -5 @martyn said:

At this time the "users recent posts" database is being reloaded.

This process involves parsing every post on every server 48 forum. A slight slowdown maybe noticed during this time, however it is being done in a way that the slowdown will be minimal if at all.

As each post is processed, it will then appear in the users recent posts again. This process works from oldest, to newest post. As such, users "recent" posts may appear to be their oldest for a short time.

Jan 11, 2008 18:38:36 GMT -5 @martyn said:

Based on the current speed of the reload, i estimate all forums "users recent posts" features will be working fully again within 1 hour.

Also as of this time, the reload has had no effect on page loading. If you are still getting Too Many Connection errors at this time, please let me know in this thread

  To echo what Martyn said, if you get the Too Many Connections error, let me know here, and I'll report it there (or you can report it there yourself, if you have an account at the PB Support forum -- just be sure to include our board URL if you do ). Again, sorry for all the inconvenience that the forum has been over the last few days ... hopefully they should have it all smoothed out soon.

[Learner-=Of-God=-]

I got the too many connections error when I clicked on the 50 most recent posts.

[Missionary-=Of-God=-]

im still getting the occasional "too many connections"

[Reaper-=Of-God=-(Sam)†]

I can't get the last 50 posts to work nor will the search function work. Gotta love that advanced technology... ;(

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

  Those functions were temporarily disabled (as noted above) in order to focus on fixing the connection errors and internal server errors. PB Support has not yet stated when those functions will be brought back online.

[Goodness]

Already Grey hair Jeff ? ;D.
I cloned myself ,i see two Goodness at the bottom of the forum wen i login .
That guy follows me everywhere

[Peace-=Of-God=-]

  I think I'm a clone now, there's always two of me just a-hangin' around;
    I think I'm a clone now, 'cause every chromosome is a hand-me-down.
   I think I'm a clone now, and I can stay at home while I'm out of town;
    I think I'm a clone now, 'cause every pair of genes is a hand-me-down."

(Sorry, couldn't help myself ... that's my one "guilty pleasure" -- I'm a "Weird Al" Yankovic fan . Funny song ... look it up on YouTube if you want, you can find some videos of it there -- my favorite is the one starring "Christo Graham".)

  Anyway, back on topic -- that has been happening off and on for the past few days ... sometimes I'm here, sometimes I'm not here, sometimes I'm here twice ... "I guess you could say I'm really beside myself!" PB Support is aware of this issue and trying to get it corrected.

[Learner-=Of-God=-]

Whenever I click on view 50 most recent posts it gives me a blank list. Any reason for this problem? or is it just my PC?
NeVerMind - I've tried on many computers and still nothing shows up.