Site Went Down

[Ratickle]

Everyone, Thanks for your patience and emails/messages.


Still don't know what happened completely. The host was doing a migration, but they said that couldn't cause it. I was still on the phone with them at 1:30 AM this morning. They had a "Team" working on the site they said.

I was emailing a programmer back and forth to see what I could find out there, he was looking at it from the Vbulletin side.

And I was in the technical support are of Vbulletin with their tech people trying to figure out what was happening.

We still do not have all the answers, but we are up, even if slow. All of the above are still trying to figure out the root cause. It appears to me as if the migration at the host was the root cause, but it was enhanced by something in our special software enhancements.

I'll keep you informed, once again thanks for your patience, sorry I couldn't get back to everyone.....

 

[Bobcat]

I blame Obamunism ...

 

[Buoy]

Phuckin Canadiens...

 

[Hellbent]

Who are you hosting with? Bluehost messes my sites up every time they do a migration. And my sites are always the ones that 'somehow' didn't get backed up. I also started keeping my customizations to a minimum just because I couldn't rely on the hosts to stay compatible. Site maintenance sucks

 

[Ratickle]

Are your sites Vbulletin based?

Our cutomizations are definitely not at "a minimum".....

 

[Hellbent]

I've used Vbulletin but I went away from it because I was doing so much customizing to make it look good and do the stuff I wanted that every time I would patch it I was having to do so much editing it was taking WAY too much of my time. I switched to SMF a few years ago. It has tons of built in features for security and auto-pruning. My maintenance days basically ended. My biggest site isn't what it used to be. I took a job out of town a couple years ago and basically let the site take care of itself. It doesn't get much traffic anymore since I don't do any content updates but it still maintains itself....lol.

 

[Ratickle]

Thanks for the info and call. I'm looking at SMF info to see what it is.

 

[Hellbent]

It's a great package. Very modular and easy to customize. If you look at the modifications page you'll find pretty much everything you need. The portals section is where you'll find the addons that would give you a front page similar to what you have now...with articles, etc. A very popular one is Simple Portal. I used PortaMX on mine. You might want to tighten up the registration security with a captcha addon like AVV. SMF has a pretty nice built in calendar for setting up events, etc. but there are plenty of calendar addons too. There's a list of it's basic features here.

Don't get too carried away with addons or customizing. Simpler is better when there isn't a full time webmaster. No matter what direction you choose I'd recommend you set up test sites with whatever packages interest you and play around with them before choosing one and putting it live.

 

[Ratickle]

Yeah, the test site for the modifications to this one were running for about a year it seems like trying to get stuff working correctly......