Flying Clams Forever

Hello Clamcakes! It's been a while. I hope you're all alive and well.

Sorry for the dramatic title. I obviously don't want to delete the forums and they're not exactly getting deleted. Circumstances are just going to require me to switch webhosts here in the next few weeks, and since the version of PHP this forum runs on is no longer supported by practically anyone, there is a very high risk that the forums will become... somewhere between damaged and unrecoverable after the switch. Therefore please save any threads you want to preserve to disk now, before... terrible things possibly happen.

Obviously there are a lot of memories here, for better or worse, and I don't want to just wipe them off the face of the earth if there are still people who care about them. So there are some solutions to this. Converting from something this old to something much newer carries a high risk of corruption, but I could try something like... incrementally upgrading this forum one version at a time until it gets to a version that newer PHP can handle, and then try transferring that over. There's other solutions I could research too, but any and all this would take some time and effort that I don't have as much to spare these days.

I guess what I'm trying to get a feeling for is just how many people actively want to preserve these forums so I can make informed choices about just how much effort to put into the process. If it's important to you all, I'll make every effort that I can. I already have the DB backed up like 40 times, so as far as I am concerned they're safe and even if it turns out I can't restore them now it's not impossible that I or someone with a greater skillset down the road will be able to restore them at some point. That's enough for my own peace of mind. But I want to hear from you all. It's clear no one really uses these forums actively anymore, but I didn't want to just pull the plug without consulting you guys, so let me know what you all think, preferably asap since I'll need to make some choices pretty soon. If you all have other suggestions I'm open to them too!

(also if you can't reply to this thread just start a new thread in another forum I literally forget if this sub-forum is set up to let people reply or not hajsgfdhskja sorry)

passing around

Ty for your service

It is somewhat important to me. At least until I have time to save things from here. Will start doing that soon, I suppose.

Preferably, I’d like to see the forum retained or in some sort of archived form — but unsure if that’s realistic or how difficult it would be to do.

Pingu wrote:It is somewhat important to me. At least until I have time to save things from here. Will start doing that soon, I suppose.

Preferably, I’d like to see the forum retained or in some sort of archived form — but unsure if that’s realistic or how difficult it would be to do.

Seems like this is more a matter of time that she doesn’t have to dedicate to the project.

I’m looking into downloading off an archive and seeing how it accessing it works. I want to say that I am 99.9% sure that the posts won’t be lost, but worst case is you might need to ask someone for them.

I’m fine with not having time to dedicate to maintaining these forums. Just don’t want posts or old nostalgic memories to be lost.

Have seen some forums migrate to different hosts/etc and have information lost, like what Aiko described is possible. So would like to prevent that/reduce the possibility of that as much as possible. Which probably means having some sort of backup or archive in case things go awry.

Or I guess she said there are backups of the DB already. Okay. Rereading the post now.

Yeah, there are backups of the DB, but they are... complicated to read without the software to read them (like you can technically see post contents but completely separated from the context of who posted them or when or even in what thread). In the very worst case scenario, I'm thinking maybe I could wipe the DB backups of password hashes and private messages and make them available for you all to make some attempt to parse through on your own time.

On the upside though, I did some research and talked to some people and I think I have better odds of migrating things over smoothly than I initially thought. So my current plan is that in around 2-3 weeks (exact date TBD), hopefully giving you all enough time to save critical stuff, I'll attempt to update the forum software to the latest version. If that doesn't break I'd say our odds are a lot better of moving intact over to the new host. If it does break, I'll do my very best to roll it back and restore it and hopefully still have enough time to find another solution before the migration happens (which... doesn't have a set date right now but... sometime in the next 1-2 months). I'll keep you all posted and I'm still open to feedback/suggestions!

Forum upgrade attempts will take place sometime this week! If anyone needs more time to save stuff let me know ASAP (though I'll make my best efforts to ensure that if something breaks I can roll it back to give us more time to figure out a solution). I don't have an exact date/time mostly because I'm attempting to do this in my downtime during work hours so it's just going to happen whenever the opportunity arises.

To clarify, migration will happen in two stages (each during which things can possible break):
1) Upgrading the forum software to a version the new host can handle -- happening this week
2) Actually migrating the forum to the new host -- happening in 0-6 weeks, depending on how things go with the upgrade.

Also to clarify, the URL to this forum will stay the same, so no need to worry about being able to find it in the future-- I'm not changing domains; just the service doing the hosting.

I'll make another post when upgrade attempts begin (so you can expect breakages for a bit) and another (hopefully) on the other side of the upgrade!

*three months later* /shot

Okay after MAYBE A LOT OF MESSINESS (and buying some extra time) we've successfully upgraded to PHPBB 3.3.

Migration happens before the end of the year but I am feeling 97% hopeful everything will be fine :>

MIGRATION IS CUrrently BEING SCHEDULED. I don't think anyone is reading these updates but I'm posting anyway.

Gaspppppp