SITE MOVED! Apologies for lost posts.

by **chrisbishop** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:16 am

As announced on March 4 on this forum - but don't look for the message! - the entire website and forum were moved to a new host platform. Unfortunaly, it seems that this changed caused for this forum to lose all messages that were posted during March, and maybe a few days in February. I'm checking out if it isn't possible for me to find them again, but I can't make any promise that I will.

Also, during that period, there had been a new member, Doctor222, who registered to our website. My apologies to you too if you are reading those lines. Please, submit your membership again, it'll be a pleasure for us to accept you. Your membership disappeared during the move, I'm afraid.

I also want to apologise for the forum being slow at times. The website seems to be working fine, but maybe because it's in a directory all by itself, the forum seems to encounter a few difficulties. Probably, the host is still working to smooth all of these problems and everything should be back to normal soon.

I'll keep you posted on this.

by **Marion** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 8:52 am

Glad to hear it has all finished at last! We do seem to have lost most of the February posts though, including DartBrat's trivia quiz :cry:

I hope we can start that again

Now to change my ID from the January one... again! :wink:

by **hazel** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:10 pm

Yes, everything since 1 February has gone. This includes, I was interested to note, my password, which I changed a couple of weeks ago.

When I logged on just now, the date of my last visit was shown as 1 February, and I know I've logged in every day since then. Is everyone else seeing that?

by **Marion** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 4:09 pm

I did notice that when I logged in the other day, I got a notification that there was a new post, but it was one from February 1st - and there was only one.
I'm afriad I didn't notice when it said my last log in was.

My ID avatar had reverted to the one I'd been using after Christmas though.

by **chrisbishop** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 7:59 pm

February 1rst seems to be the date from which the entire forum was "rebooted", so to speak. Since the move was on March 8th, and that it looks like the website is up to date (last updates was February 25, and it shows on the yellow banner of all the related pages), and since I made minor non-dated updates that are still there on the website, my only guess is that my host simply reinstalled the forum with the earliest backup they had of it.

My backup is even earlier - I made one on March 7, then another one on March 10, while the 'old' platform was still functionning. But I really am not sure how to exactly upload the files. I'm trying to contact the host on that subject, but it does look like we might have to forgot about those lost posts.

Still news to come on the subject.

by **DartBrat701** » Sun Mar 16, 2008 11:18 pm

Marion wrote:Glad to hear it has all finished at last! We do seem to have lost most of the February posts though, including DartBrat's trivia quiz
I hope we can start that again

Most certainly! ......with some new questions, too!

Marion wrote:Now to change my ID from the January one... again! [/color]

Me too!

by **Carrie** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:14 pm

Typical, the only time I write a post of any length and merit, it gets bombed..
:cry:

by **chrisbishop** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 3:19 pm

It looks like they have repaired the problem! I accessed the forum yesterday evening, and it came in a flash. Same this morning!

Anybody noticed that the forum is way faster now?

Unfortunately, it looks like our missing messages will stay that way

by **chrisbishop** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 3:34 pm

Ah sorry - I just experienced some slowness again... It seems they are still working on the problem, and that results in fluctuations of speed.

Let's hope that it'll be corrected soon now. I'm getting impatient, and I know that you are too!

by **chrisbishop** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 11:31 am

It's been weeks now, and the problem with the forum being slow has not been corrected. I know the forum lost many members who, at least don't sign in anymore - It takes too slow to load to actually be able to participate! At least most of the time, as I noticed there were moments where the forum is actually running to a good speed.

I'm annoyed with my host, and I'm bothering them nearly every day since the start of all this. It is still all due to that move they did to a new platform. While it seems to have done better to the website itself, the forum is suffering a great deal about this.

The last e-mail received by the host technicians concerning this has this small paragraph:

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. I verified your web site and observed that the web site loads just fine. The issue is an intermittent one, and occurs since our MySql servers were getting many requests from many customers and hence sometimes loads very slowly. Our engineers at the NetOps team are working on it to have the issue resolved.

While I "appreciate" their working on this, I'm kind of thinking they are not doing a great job at it and they are causing this forum great prejudice. I know other forums on the same servers are as slow as this one.

What I'd like for you members who are reading these lines to do is this: please, try to sign in, and reply to this message with notes of your own, to show to this host's technicians that we not happy with what's going on. Keep civile, keep polite, but be firm and honest.

I thank you in advance for your help.

Chris

by **hazel** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:09 pm

The forum loaded quickly for me three minutes ago (it's now 11.06 GMT), as did the "View posts since last visit" page. However, this thread took about 45 seconds to open - the status bar showed "Done" for at least 30 seconds before the page actually opened.

This Reply pane opened quickly, though. Let's see how long it takes to submit and return to the forum.

by **Serena Lewis** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 8:24 pm

The forum started loading quicker for me since about 9pm yesterday. It's still pretty slow though, and sometimes links don't open when I click on them still.
It is a bit better...

xx

by **Mary** » Thu Mar 27, 2008 11:20 pm

While the main site http://www.spectrum-headquarters.com opens almost immediately, this forum sometimes takes as much as a full minute to open; other times it opens more quickly but the average is definitely between 30 to 45 seconds between pages.

by **Skybase Girl** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 10:34 pm

Access to the site itself is slower, in general, I think, with the forum being particularly slow.

It has been better over the last week, but tonight seems troublesome. That might be just that my broadband connection is not as fast as it should be ( or not as fast as we're paying for !)

by **Marion** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 10:51 pm

I had the reason for broadband slowness explained to me, Skybase Girl, and I pass it on - for what it is worth. (ie. I have no idea if it is true) It is due to local network clusters, and if your cluster is busy, its going to be slow - whatever speed you pay for.
As I said - I have no idea if it is true - but it does stop me putting a brick through the CPU every now and again... :wink: