Upcoming Possible Board Outage

[Dale]

Friends,

Beginning January 19th, Dreamhost, the service which hosts this forum, will be upgrading all forums to the latest version of PHP, the software on which this forum runs. In addition, there we anticipate some other changes ahead on the technical side at Dreamhost.

There is a good chance this will take the board offline for some period of time. Could be extended. That's not SUPPOSED to happen, but:

For years now, we've been aware of a problem with the database associated with the forum. (As forums go, it's a very large database and an old one. This board has been running here for 15 years.) None of your moderators have the expertise to track this problem down and fix it. It has been responsible for some of the glitches over recent years when the forums are slow-loading or don't work at all. For reasons that remain unclear to me, Dreamhost does not offer the kind of tech support we need for this.

We have looked, at various times, to moving the forum to a service that specializes in PHP boards and manage the technical side. I own the forum and pay for the hosting service. That cost to me is offset by the Google ad banners. Moving to a specialized hosting service would cost more than I am able to pay.

The upgrade could go fine. If not--and the board goes offline--I will reconfigure things so that forums.chiffandfipple.com will automatically direct visitors to a website I'll have prepared to provide updates about attempts to get things running again.

Thanks. Hope to see you on the other side of this!

Best regards,

Dale

[Brus]

When I first saw this, I thought it said there would possibly be a board outRage.



So I'm relieved it will only be an outage at most.