Chat Forum Upgrade

On the night before D Day, General Eisenhower prepared two statements. One was a report on the successful landings and invasion. The other was to be used if it all went horribly wrong and the allies were retreating from the beaches. Thank goodness we never heard the latter.

Anyway, not that our chat forums are as important as D Day, I still have a slight inkling of how he must have felt. The update to the chat forums is under way and I’m sitting with fingers crossed, which makes it hard to type, I can tell you!

The new forums are based on different software and so it’s a big changeover. All the posts etc are held in a database and that contains nearly six million records that have to be moved over. Incredible, but true. It doesn’t just contain posts, but users, personal messages, photographs and other bits it needs to work.

For the moderator team, it’s going to be a bit of a task as well – new systems and methods that we are not used to.

For our members it shouldn’t be a huge change, some things may not look quite the same but generally it’s pretty straightforward. Some areas will be a big improvement – for a start there is a new picture gallery system I’ve bought at huge expense, draining the foreign currency reserves of the UK ($50.00) It’s far better than the old system and members can link to photos in there from their posts, which you couldn’t do on the old system

It gets even better – members needn’t have photos hosted anywhere now. They can upload a photograph with a post and it will show on there.

There’s going to be some glitches and problems, but I’m sure we’ll have those sorted over the next week or two. Please bear with us as we sort out the bugs.

In the future, the forums will be easier to maintain and we’ll be adding some new features, after we’ve got things as they are working, of course. Exciting times!

I do hope I’m not taking this down to explain why it’s all gone horribly wrong!

Update

We sort of came on line at midnight and were sorting little snags until 2am, there’s a few little tweaks and adjustments but things seem to be working well. I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to John Brunton and especially to Tom Rice of BR Web Consulting for their help, advice, support and professional approach. Without them I doubt this would have happened!