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Forum Changes - Update / Status


Origami

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I'm just starting a thread to document forum changes so we stop beating on the "Forum is going down at 10:45 PM" thread. The title of that thread is a bit ominous and I don't want it to be confusing for people just seeing it.

Here is an update of where we are with the changes to the forum.

  • We successfully upgraded from the unsupported and outdated version 3.8.4 forum software to version 4.3.6. This was a major move for us and not without some bumps.
  • We re-enabled our payment gateway for membership payments.
  • We secured the site which is now accessed via https.
  • Signatures were just re-enabled. You may want to check yours to make sure it's displaying correctly. (Where you used to have to put an extra carriage return in to get a blank line between paragraphs, the system automatically puts a space between paragraphs. So, if you have a double space in your signature, it looks like an acre of white space now. Fix it.)
  • There are formatting changes that we have to make to various legacy content. That's an ongoing project. The About WAMAS and Education pages were worked on last night. Some of that content needs to be updated.
  • TOTM content is up and working. This includes fixing the nominations database behavior that we experienced immediately after the upgrade.
  • Sponsor banners are implemented as ads at the top of the page as random ads.
  • The default community home/index page now redirects to the forum. This should resolve the errors that some users experienced.
  • Bulk mail has been tested with a very small distribution. It works.
  • Provisioned server with updated configuration with PHP 7.2 plus OpCache.
  • Provisioned server with a second CPU core (2 cores total) and an added 4 GB RAM (8 GB total) to improve user experience
  • Updated MySQL from v 5.6 to v5.7.

Some changes you may notice:

  • You now have to log into the forum using your (displayed) screen name which, for about a third of us, might be different than your old login name. For Tapatalk users, log out and log back in to re-establish contact between the app and the forum. Otherwise you'll be looking at a spinning circle forever (which is very unsatisfying).
  • The look and navigation of the site is different. Time to explore. I'm still wading through it myself.
  • You can embed images and videos by just posting a link to the image. No need to use the IMG tags any more. If you really want just the link, then click the "link" button that looks like a chain link in the editor.
  • I've added superscripts, subscripts, and indented text to the editor. I'll find this helpful when posting things like Ca(OH)2. Some button visibility changes depending upon whether you're being served the large, medium, or small view of the editor. 

Things we're still looking at doing include

  • Nothing. The major improvements are now complete.
Edited by Origami
Planned upgrades complete
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Are you still working on the sponsor banners?  I saw them for a while, but now don't see them.  I have AdBlock turned off for wamas.org and Ghostery is disabled.

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The default community home/index page now redirects to the forum. This should resolve the errors that some users experienced.

Bulk mail has been tested with a very small distribution. It works.

The forum reindexing is nearing completion. It should complete in the next hour or half hour.

I intend on taking the forum offline again around midnight to reboot the server to take a snapshot backup and to apply some kernal updates.

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The last two planned steps have been completed.

To provide an improved user experience, we provisioned a second CPU core and doubled our RAM to 8 GB on our virtual server. 

We also updated our MySQL database installation to v5.7.

In general, things look they're running rather smoothly given the major surgery performed. The patient seems to be recovering nicely.

Thank you everybody for being patient through the last 5 days of disruption and changes. Please know that the work of the last week has put us in a better position to safely, reliably and effectively serve the community in future years.

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