Site upgrade

FlyingRon

Moderator
Ron
I just finished the past precursor to upgrading the site out of the way. Starting early Thursday, the sites will be in transition for as long as it takes me to migrate the data from the old site to the new site.
The process to move just the forums will take several hours. Moving the gallery data (over 30 GB) takes the better part of a day. The old site will be at best READ ONLY (look but no posts). It may not even be that functional.
When the transition is complete, the new site will become www.ncwoodworker.net, and the old one will be retained as old.ncwoodworker.net (though it will be left read only) for a short time just to make sure nothing got lost.

Your usernames and the like will be unchanged. Your avatars seem to come back to life on the test forums, so that should be good.

THINGS not yet implemented:

Articles - these are going to have to be manually moved over. Fortunately, there aren't that many, but this can be done after the site is switched.
Classifieds - I've not found a reasonable classified system for XF2. I'm continuing to work on that. In the interim, you can just post your for sale or whatever in the appropriate forums as regular posts.
Tapatalk - I will install this addon as soon as the transition is done.
Chat - This will come right after tapatalk.

In discussing with the rest of the board, we're not going to implement the "visit frequency" requirements as defined in the Discount Program (DQ) and the User Privilege Levels.
The other requirements will remain the same (days as a member, number of posts, Who-we-are thread, Name, Addr, OptIn, and Telephone Number). To maintain any of the statuses of DQ, User, Senior User, or Corporate Member, you will need to have had some activity on the board in the last 30 days.

Thank you for bearing with us during the upgrade.
 

Hmerkle

Board of Directors, Development Director
Hank
Staff member
Corporate Member
Ron,
Can you put a banner in place when the transition begins on Thursday?
Hopefully this will warn everyone that the site is read-only during the transition...

BTW - CANNOT wait to get over to XF, I am sure there will be struggles, but hopefully less bubble gum and band-aids?!
 
Last edited:

ehpoole

Administrator
Ethan
Ron,
Can you put a banner in place when the transition begins on Thursday?
Hopefully this will warn everyone that the site is read-only during the transition...

BTW - CANNOT wait to get over to XF, I am sure there will be struggles, but hopefully less bubble gum and band-aids?!

Most likely Ron will be placing the vBulletin site in “admin” maintenance mode for the duration of the transfer. In that case the site will be offline for ordinary users and will be replaced by a banner message with whatever message he opts to provide (such as an explanation plus ETA, etc.). In this mode only those with admin level permissions can actually access the site (you may have seen me place the server in that mode in years past when performing vBulletin patches or resolving issues where I had to keep other users out of the server for awhile to test new code, in which case my message was typically a brief explanation of the issue/action and an estimated ETA).

The only way *I* know of off-hand to perform a true global “read only” state on the site would require tampering with MySQL server permissions (effectively forbidding write access to the database...which would likely throw a ton of “database error” emails in our mailboxes since vBulletin will still be trying to repeatedly write to the database with every access to the site...so (admin) email would likely also need to be disabled...and things like user logins will fail as well since the security token can not be recorded without write access).

Ron, I presume we’ll be keeping this “old” server around (but private) for at least the duration while we are redoing plugin and template code (at least a few months) as it will be much simpler to do if we can use the old site to actively research both the plugin code as well as the necessary template changes? We will also need to record the state of ad runs and their expiration dates along with all the other myriad “minor” details to resolve after the transfer to XF where keeping the old site around for awhile as reference will prove highly useful.

Good luck and I can not tell you how grateful I am for all your hard work!
 

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