Why I Endure the Hell of Forum Software Upgrading

[sisyphus]

Ok so today's forum software upgrade was no less grueling than last time. I hope you are all able to log on and read this. Flush your browser cache if you're having issues. We are currently missing Likes and mentions, so until the extension authors upgrade their extensions to work with the current software we will just have to do without.

I thought I'd say why I go through this hell, and make a day of PSF hard for you every time I do this.

As recently as 7 years ago, smokersforums.co.uk was the monolith of pipe smoking lore and knowledge. There were 50,000 registered users. GL Pease, Neill Archer Roan, Bob Runowski....these are just a few names that were active smokersforums users. Many, many more were there. Collectors. Historians. Guys now departed who knew more about pipes and tobacco than I will ever learn my whole life. They had a catastrophic failure, and apparently no backup. They got the site back up, but the hundreds of thousands of past posts were gone forever. So much history. So much knowledge. I couldn't take it and left after they had a second outage.

Tamp & Puff. Absentee owner. Run by guys he put in charge but who likely do not have the ability to do anything important about the behind the scenes aspect of their forum. If that site goes down it's over. If they need to upgrade their forum software because it currently depends on an outdated version of a library their hosting no longer supports, it's over. All those guys who have put time in to make that place a community and developed friendships there over the years will just be shit out of luck.

Brothers of Briar. I mean look at it. Same forum it was a decade ago. If something breaks who fixes it and what happens to that community?

We all know what happened to PSF v1.

I am trying my best to painlessly, which I guess I suck at judging by the last two upgrades, keep our forum up to date with current web and tech standards. I have a bad habit of hand editing php and html files and then not documenting, which I swear I will never ever do again. That makes upgrading harder than it needs to be. Also this upgrade illustrated that you want as little functionality as possible dependent on 3rd party extensions.

So we are up to date and I will be working on getting the site looking and running as slick as it was last night. My morning really sucked, but I don't mind paying this price to ensure that PSF works today and works next year as well. I am sorry about how it disrupts your use of PSF, but a bad day a couple times a year is a small price to pay if it means we don't have a catastrophic, unrecoverable failure down the road.

[kxg]

And we thank you for enduring the pain and suffering so that a stable forum results.

[CoreyR]

Hey brother, YOU are doing the work. I am not going to complain.
When you get done though, could you let me know how to set this thing back to the "classic" view. I am just a tad "old fashioned!"
...if no one had guessed.

[Islayphile]

Hey brother, YOU are doing the work. I am not going to complain.
When you get done though, could you let me know how to set this thing back to the "classic" view. I am just a tad "old fashioned!"
...if no one had guessed.

Yes, classic view please when you have the time.

[CoreyR]

....but wait until you are finished with everything...No sense in setting it and resetting it and we won't drop dead or anything without it....unlike the suffering I had to endure when McClellands shut down!

[Houtenziel]

I have a bad habit of hand editing php and html files and then not documenting, which I swear I will never ever do again. That makes upgrading harder than it needs to be. Also this upgrade illustrated that you want as little functionality as possible dependent on 3rd party extensions.

Look on the bright side.. you could have built an entire forum on top of a highly customized and completely unsupported forum plugin, running on top of an outdated version of Wordpress like some "other" forums I've run in to..
I appreciate the effort you put in to the forum, especially given that it is entirely a labor of love. And honestly(I may be an extreme outlier here), but I don't really care that much about likes or mentions. On the one hand, yes it lets you know someone is talking about you or has read your post - On the other, I had turned a lot of those notifications off anyway so I guess it didn't really matter. If someone quotes me, then I suppose that is enough for me to want to see immediately if there is something I should respond to.

[Whalehead King]

Ok so today's forum software upgrade was no less grueling than last time. I hope you are all able to log on and read this. Flush your browser cache if you're having issues. We are currently missing Likes and mentions, so until the extension authors upgrade their extensions to work with the current software we will just have to do without.

I thought I'd say why I go through this hell, and make a day of PSF hard for you every time I do this.

As recently as 7 years ago, smokersforums.co.uk was the monolith of pipe smoking lore and knowledge. There were 50,000 registered users. GL Pease, Neill Archer Roan, Bob Runowski....these are just a few names that were active smokersforums users. Many, many more were there. Collectors. Historians. Guys now departed who knew more about pipes and tobacco than I will ever learn my whole life. They had a catastrophic failure, and apparently no backup. They got the site back up, but the hundreds of thousands of past posts were gone forever. So much history. So much knowledge. I couldn't take it and left after they had a second outage.

Tamp & Puff. Absentee owner. Run by guys he put in charge but who likely do not have the ability to do anything important about the behind the scenes aspect of their forum. If that site goes down it's over. If they need to upgrade their forum software because it currently depends on an outdated version of a library their hosting no longer supports, it's over. All those guys who have put time in to make that place a community and developed friendships there over the years will just be shit out of luck.

Brothers of Briar. I mean look at it. Same forum it was a decade ago. If something breaks who fixes it and what happens to that community?

We all know what happened to PSF v1.

I am trying my best to painlessly, which I guess I suck at judging by the last two upgrades, keep our forum up to date with current web and tech standards. I have a bad habit of hand editing php and html files and then not documenting, which I swear I will never ever do again. That makes upgrading harder than it needs to be. Also this upgrade illustrated that you want as little functionality as possible dependent on 3rd party extensions.

So we are up to date and I will be working on getting the site looking and running as slick as it was last night. My morning really sucked, but I don't mind paying this price to ensure that PSF works today and works next year as well. I am sorry about how it disrupts your use of PSF, but a bad day a couple times a year is a small price to pay if it means we don't have a catastrophic, unrecoverable failure down the road.

Thanks, Sis.

I hate doing all that stuff, too. It's never simple.

Thanks for keeping things on an even keel.
-WK

[Tsal]

Thank you.

[Fr_Tom]

I endured two total crashes of smokersforums.co.uk and lost post count, content, etc. You are right that it was a treasure trove of wisdom.

I appreciate the efforts here to keep things stable.

[Cobman]

Thank you for keeping it going! I don't post much but I sure enjoy reading everyone else's posts.