Website Goes Back In Time

[Steve Herschbach]

Welcome to March 30th 2024!

The forum had a database meltdown that required loading a backup from 3/30/2024. All posts since them are gone, and all members who signed up after that date will have to register again. I can understand why you might not want to but this is my first forum failure since 1998, so maybe give it another try. 

We had lost the years of accumulated post "likes" and the good news is those have been restored. Knowing which posts got the most attention over the years was very valuable in zeroing in on the best information. I have upgraded the database software to the latest version and turned off all the third party plugins that were running in hopes of avoiding another meltdown. Work to stabilize and optimize the forum for better stability will be ongoing on a daily basis the next couple weeks.

One plugin in particular formatted the thread titles so each word had the first letter in caps. It looked nice I think, but it was out of date and unsupported. So I shut it off and thread titles will be whatever people put in them. Might look messier but I want to get the forum as close to vanilla operation as possible. There was a plugin for "Member since" under your avatar and one that allowed me to bump topics - both gone for the same reason. We are now just running plain vanilla Invision in the hope that it wil prevent whatever caused the previous database corruption to occur. Main lesson learned is I will be implementing automatic database backups to replace my haphazard and ultimately lax manual backups. No more rolling back two months if another meltdown occurs.

I apologize to everyone who had posts go away, and members who have to register again. Thanks for your patience and for supporting the forum.

Steve Herschbach

P.S. Just before this happened the forum went to not allowing user name for login since everyone can see what your user name is. It got set to require your email on file and password to login. I have reverted this temporarily to allow login with user name, but do update your email on file and start using that to log in. If you made that change in the last couple months you need to do so again.

Also, if you have Newsletters turned off under notification settings I can't email you. I sent everyone an email for like the second time ever, and 28% of people had it shut off. Just saying. I won't send you anything ever unless it's super important, I promise.

[phrunt]

I'm not sure if it's my phones slow internet but I can't open messages, will try in a different location, all else seems OK but slow indicating likely my internet

[Tony]

Steve.......you should have checked the flux capacitor.

Regards,

Doc

 

[Tony]

I was wondering why these past couple of months the site was loading / moving like a three legged horse.

It feels quite snappy now.

Thanks for the hard work you put into this site Steve.....glad is was down but not out !

[Steve Herschbach]

Still getting one specific error reporting but it is very specific to Invision and I have a support ticket open with them to check it out. So not 100% yet but getting there, fingers crossed.

[Steve Herschbach]

Still way too slow for me but like I said am getting a specialist in to look at the system, so please hang in there for a bit longer.

[geof_junk]

Forum loads good,.......but sometime slow when loading page and very slow when clicking on " next unread post "

[Steve Herschbach]

Finally have Invision seeing the problem is real and bumped to high level support to finally get to the bottom of all this. If they can’t fix it then it can’t be fixed. Fingers crossed.

[Jonathan Porter]

Steve thanks for making the effort. Your forum is the last bastion of metal detecting info that isn’t social media related and is a true testament to the effort you’ve put into it over the years.

Frights like this remind us all of its true value, I for one appreciate this resource and the effort that goes into keeping it viable in an ever increasing now now now add water and stir world. 

A huge big thanks from the land down under. 🙏