This idea that Reader Management is unaware of the complaints and the frustrations of some on the SDMB and doesn’t give a shit about the membership is not correct. I read the SDMB almost daily checking ATMB for issues and concerns, I read it at home for personal enjoyment, I experience the occasional timeout while using it. I’m not unaware of what is going on. I also don’t have the attitude that I don’t give a shit about the membership.
Who is responsible for the running of the SDMB and makes technical decisions about the hardware and day to day operation? I am. Here is my contact information:
Jerry Davis
Information Systems Director
Chicago Reader, Inc.
11 E. Illinois St.
Chicago, IL 60611
Thank you for stepping up to take responsibility. (Given the large numbers of posters here who like to express themselves … forcibly, you are also a brave man. )
This is the only website I pay for, so I know the site is a great idea and do appreciate the work you put into it.
I think the criticism above was because we thought there were newspaper executives who make financial decisions without being well-acquainted with the board. You do not fit that description.
Could I ask if you are satisfied with the funding? I realise that this may well be confidential commercial information, but I am only concerned with receiving a swifter response at the SDMB.
Also, as the technical guy, is it not possible / desirable to upgrade to a later version of Vbulletin?
This was also my assumption. Thank you, Jerry, for clearing that up. I guess I had a mental picture of some faceless execs making arbitrary decisions about the board. I also guess I should stay the hell away from these threads when I am 7 weeks pregnant and feeling hormonal, not that that is an excuse. Do we have an embarrassed smiley?
As well as almost every other time I’ve seen an Admin mention the management.
Read my post again, Jerry, and you’ll see that I was actually bitching on your side - You being one of the Admins doing the day to day running of the place. Never said you didn’t give a shit about the membership, I said your bosses didn’t give much of a shit about you.
I’m pretty much the management so if other Admins/Mods are mentioning the management or the Chicago Reader they almost assuredly are referring to me. I know people have a beef and that beef definitely should be with me. The other Admins/Mods are blameless in the failure to rectify the issues being discussed. That is something I am working on but I’ve not made much progress to date.
I apologize for the slowness in handling this situation but I will come up with a solution effectively balancing everyone’s needs and desires. I know people are tired of promises and I’m not here to promise anything instead I will resolve the issues.
It’s nice of you to fall on the grenade for the Reader…you’re not the problem, though, AFAICT. My previous comments (in the other thread) were made towards at least a pay grade or two above you, and they still stand.
What Exit? recommended that I post the following here.
I’ve upgraded a vBulletin-based message board many times. It’s simple;
[ul]
[li]Back up the old MySQL database and vBulletin scripts, just in case.[/li][li]Optimize/repair the database, again just in case. (Can be performed from MySQL, or using a one click process in the vBulletin administration menu).[/li][li]FTP the new vBulletin scripts right over the old scripts.[/li][li]Run an upgrade script ([forum root]/install/upgrade.php).[/li][li]Enter your license number when prompted.[/li][li]Click “continue” when prompted. (You’ll be clicking on “continue” more than usual if the version you’re upgrading from is several releases old.) [/ul][/li]
That’s it. The upgrading process will take longer because of the size of the SDMB database and the age of the existing version of vBulletin (there will be more steps in an upgrade from 3.0.7 to 3.6.2 than a simple update from 3.6.1 to 3.6.2), but otherwise it’s quite easy. If there are any problems, it’s usually due to file permissions or a database that was partially corrupted before the upgrade.
vBulletin 3.6.* (two generations ahead of what the SDMB uses now) doesn’t require any upgrades to PHP or MySQL. You don’t have to upgrade Apache from version 1.3.31.
I’m running vBulletin 3.6.2 on my site. It’s very stable and quite secure. The old vBulletin captcha was cracked by a group of Russian spammers; the 3.6 captcha hasn’t been cracked, and you can add custom fonts and background images to thwart cracking efforts. On the vBulletin message board, many report spam dropping considerably after upgrading to 3.6.*. There’s also many new features like a built-in user warning system, multi-quoting, and plug-in hacks that don’t require script modification. Ajax is also incorporated into some features, such as in-line post and title editing.
elmwood, I don’t know that optimizing from the web interface would be the best method with a database this large. Have you run in that way on a large-ish DB before? It times out on mine on occasion, and the SDMB has five times the posts I do.
Also, just a tip that I use - I like to make a copy of the vBulletin files on the server, then upload the new files to the copied directory. That way I can do the upload while the site is still online. Then, when I’m ready to upgrade, I move the live folder out of the way (call it something like boards.360 or whatever), move the copied folder with the new files back to the original location (boards), then upgrade from there. Saves me a little time if the upgrade crashes and burns and I have to go back to the old version too (which has only happened once in almost six years of using vBulletin).
And I love 3.6.x too. So many great additions, especially for admins/mods.
Hi Jerry,
From the Techie/more power point of view, are you willing to share the specs on the new server vs. the old server? I know a lot of us would be interested, but I also understand if you do not want to share the info as many would still complain.
I use the built-in vBulletin optimization/repair feature on a message board with a 400 MB database containing just over 300,000 posts. No problems with timing out. With boards that have more than a million posts, I’d optimize/repair from the shell, or optimize individual tables from vBulletin or phymyadmin.
That’s great advice. Mind if I try it sometime?
Regarding old posts: in the mid- and late 1990s, my message board was baded on WWWBoard, a god-awful set of Perl scripts that was, unfortunately, the best message board system you could get at the time without having to pay thousands of dollars. About a year ago, I imported those old WWWBoard messages into vBulletin, converting them to WWWThreads, then to phpBB, and then importing them into the existing vBulletin database.
It would be great to see some of those AOL bulletin board-era messages imported to vBulletin (I read somewhere here that those posts are still around, hidden deep inside AOL and still accessible if you know where to look). I’m sure there’s some skilled programmer here willing to create a script to get those old posts imported into vBulletin.
OMG WWWBoard. I remember that horror well, that’s where my messageboard started in 1998 (October 98 actually, happy birthday to me). I went to UBB in 2000, then got fed up with them and went to vBulletin in January 2001. They still suck btw, Ars Technica (a fine tech site) uses them for their messageboard and it’s a monstrosity. It still uses pop-ups for replying to threads for Pete’s sake.
And of course you can use that technique. I don’t have a patent on good vB practices, I just use it a lot.
Thank you, Jerry, for stepping up. I eagerly await the new server (I’ve been experiencing more timeouts than usual today, and it gets old), and I certainly hope you’ll be able to recover the old threads.
Is there any technical reason why a second database could not be made and old posts transferred into it? Then again, it seems plausible that that would be a long, tedious, and laborious process.
Hopefully I’m not out of line posting to this thread after a week or so.
I’d like to say thanks to everyone for the information giving in this thread, in particular …
Question for Jerry (or anyone else), if someone with the spare space and bandwidth offered to host a static archive of the offloaded posts do you think that some arrangement could be reached to get both the written permission and the posts themselves.
I’ve just discovered that 90% of my posts are inaccessable at the moment. Should we expect an update in the near future on how the situation is progressing?
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