Open For Business

There are still quite a few things that aren’t in the right place. Don’t be surprised if the site goes down for a half hour or so of maintenance at random times.

But I think I’ve caught everything that would make it difficult to navigate, read, or post to the new forum. Let me know if something is still whacked. That includes the colors. (The “Post a New Topic” page was showing up as a plain white background with white text boxes and black letters. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ve caught everything like that.)

User names and passwords appear to have come through just fine. I did find an archive with the avatars, but we lost the links between user and avatar. You’ll find them in a gallery called “OldAttic” available in your profile.

Most of your old bookmarks will no longer work, as the new forum uses a completely different post naming scheme.

Enjoy!

We Have Messages

Not everything is just right yet, so I’m keeping the board offline until I have a chance to fix things like reading and posting permissions. For the moment, though, I’m taking myself and my day-long migraine back to bed. (And yes, I’ve taken drugs. Enough to look over the conversion results and type this up.) More tomorrow, I hope.

It is by caffeine alone that I set my mind in motion.

This is me the last few days. Emergencies at the office capped by 28 hours straight Thursday and Friday, followed by an attempt at enforcing some detox time. I was mainlining caffeine there for a while, but got the whole mess out the door before I had to switch over to an IV drip. The hands acquire shakes….

Somewhere in there, Invision contacted me about reviewing the conversion results. There are problems, the major one being that the threads came in with the posts in reverse order, so it’s all going back to Invision for a redo. The other major problem, that it at first appears that some fora are missing, is a result of the hack the old forum used to make multi-level categories. The missing fora are simply out of place. I suspect that will end up being fixed by hand, though I’ll ask the conversion guys if there’s a quick fix for it via script. Less major, but still annoying, is that the quote boxes aren’t always rendering. This is something I’ve seen before with IPB and at that time had to do with extraneous newlines and other codes among the quote tags. Might be fixable with a search / replace in the database.

In other news, the avatars are missing in action. That directory in my latest backup ist kaput. I was looking for an older backup to see if I could recover some of them, at least, when all hell broke out at work. Hope everyone still has copies of their avatars handy, because I have more overtime coming up over the next couple of weeks. Half the office is out on vacation next week, which kinda leaves me as ranking noncom and the only one qualified to convince Excel to do calculus.

So I’m going to stop babbling now and try to catch a couple of hours of sleep. More info when I have it.

We Have Members

A quick update on the database conversion. The member data tables have been converted, and the forum tree is mostly in place. (I may have to tweak it a bit before I reopen the forum.) I do still need to find the avatars directory in my last site backup and get that back into place.

I plan to purge the forum list and the member list down to the Attic only once the conversion is complete. We still have a lot of members from the Flat Dereth Society who haven’t visited since that monarchy dissolved several years ago. There were some attempts at adding areas for other games that never got off the ground. If someone is really attached to the handful of posts in, say, the Star Wars Galaxies section, please let me know.

Working on the Database

We’re running into memory issues with the conversion, I assume because we’re a very wordy bunch.

We may have to take the site offline to complete the conversion. DO NOT PANIC. </Hawkwind>

In case of sonic attack, er, the site going offline, I will post updates at gamejag.wordpress.com.

It’s Time

Invision has asked for FTP access to our server to begin live testing of the database conversion. I do not have a definite ETA for the beginning of the actual conversion.

Meanwhile, I have a VERY preliminary test site up at ipbtest.gamejag.net. Will those of you with display concerns please let me know if there are problems with the current default skin and theme? I will be testing and tweaking a scheme for moving the novels pages into Drupal in addition to exploring / testing the admin functions, so don’t be surprised if posts, forums, or novels randomly appear and disappear.

Ursula: That address is no longer good. Email me at oystergirl at gamejag.com.

ETA: I believe the limited javascript I’ll need to use has all been installed. Any changes / additions from this point out should be strictly layout or graphics.

Skin Shopping

Now is the time to express any strong feelings about the forum appearance.

Progress Report

I have the license for the new board in hand and will be submitting the formal conversion request later today. Work, ah, got very interesting yesterday, so further progress will be in fits and starts until I can turn management of a project back over to our lead engineer, hopefully tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be moving this blog over to status.gamejag.net soon.

I’m Here to Report

That there’s (almost) nothing to report. I have heard from Invision, and they’re looking at the database.

We temporarily lost the novels pages. I restored them from a backup tonight, and discovered that the third-party java menu Leo had used in the sidebar is serving popups. I’ll be going through them in the morning and stripping that out.

Donations Accepted

At the urging of some members, I’ve added a donations button. The license for IPB is $150. Database conversion pricing starts at $60, but I’m obviously expecting it to be more.

The simplest way to accept donations is through our host, which saves me the time and effort of setting up a business account through Paypal. And, not incidentally, doesn’t complicate my income taxes for the year.

Money donated through this link will go directly toward paying the monthly costs of running the site. I can’t cash out the donations to use directly for the new software. I’m lucky enough to be able to pay the upfront costs, but having a reserve for the site operation costs will allow me to divert that part of my monthly budget to paying off the credit card charge faster. That’s a trade-off I’m willing to live with in exchange for making less of a mess out of my taxes next April.

Thanks, guys.