website issue

[mikeyr]

Hi,
I have gotten 2 emails from different users saying the website is not working correctly. It all appears good to me, I have been lazy and not looked at the new users in over a week so I do need to do that and activate new users.

My last day at work this holiday was Dec. 19 so there are 1,030 new users, I am sure there are 2 or 3 valid ones in that list and the other 1,000 + will be spammers, it will take me a while to catch up.

But, if you are having issues with the website, please e-mail me and let me know what issues exactly since as I mentioned, 2 users have said it was down. The logs show it has been working fine, no errors or issues.

Mike

[mikeyr]

so the problem is with Google Chrome, works fine in Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer...working on the issue, good time to update the site too.

[mikeyr]

ok, its too much work to fix the Chrome issues since I am planning on updating the site, I am going to work a little harder on that instead. So for now, Chrome breaks the main site sorry, I will update the site soon.

On another note, I got a rash or registrations to the forum, over 700 this weekend alone. Obviously 99.99% SPAMmers but if I missed any legitimate registrations just let me know, I found 2 legitimate registrations in the list. I think this past week makes a record, I had 1,146 new forum registrations total (including the 700 over the weekend) normally I get about a dozen a day so around 100 a week on average of which 1 or 2 a month are valid.

This is getting to be a major time suck, I had to sort through 1,000 or so registrations just a week ago when i had slacked off for 3 weeks but with this weekends hit by the spammers, its really taking up lots of my time to sort through all the individual registrations. It may be time to allow open registrations and BAN people after the first non-Singer post but if i do that, there will be porn on the site that may sit a day or 2 before I remove it and I like knowing that the majority of the registered users are Singer people, instead of having tens of thousands of registered users and only 1,000 Singer people.

[mikeyr]

ok, here is the scoop, its a long read sorry.

I am the webmaster and I keep this place up and running, but a few years ago when things changed in the club, I was given lots of promises and told lots of things would change, well nothing changed and nothing has happened. I decided I would not update the site, the main website, until I was given stuff to put on the site as promised. That is why until last week the main site still had 2014 Stowe events on it. Unlike some club officers, I do have some pride and I have been pretty embarrassed at the total lack website updating. Now that the old website menu is broken on some web browsers (still works on others but wont for long as the technology is too old) I am being forced to do a update and unfortunately, i waited too long for it to be easy.

So to bring the website into the 21st century, I updated the main website using the old context but new menu system and some new graphics, it looks GREAT (pat on the back). Oops, that required I update PHP to a current version and this forum software is too old and breaks with the new PHP versions, so I have to update the forum software. The image gallery also does not support the new versions of PHP.

All that above is to say, over the next week or so, this forum and the main website will be down a few times, sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a few hours. I have it all backed up and i will back it up again AND test the backup to make sure i can recover to at least where we are now.

Also, once we are up and running again, the website will be exclusively using HTTPS, we have been using HTTPS for about a year now, it seems about half of you are using HTTPS and the other half still using HTTP. Google hurts the search ratings for sites that still have HTTP. For those of you using HTTPS, nothing will change but for those still using HTTP you will have to re-login with your user/pass, if you don't know your password you will have to use the "forgot password" to reset it. That should be the only difference between the old and the new versions that you need to be aware of, there are new features in the new version and we can get into those at a later date.

Mike

[mikeyr]

Some of you may have noticed the forum died today...I tried to do a update and it failed miserably.

I have to talk to my hosting company about updating PHP for me, I don't have the privileges. It said it did it, but then crashed out when the forum ran.

Back to square one.... but its all back up and running, theoretically NOTHING LOST