Hey guys,

Just like the "back from the dead" post below I'm about to change hosts again as it will be cheaper, just more hassle and a bit of downtime. Hopefully not as much as last time, I'm a little more prepared but have forgotten a lot of what I did three years ago.

I did just send an email to everyone's registered address as well, so don't worry, it's not Vinnie, the site is not going away for any reason, just forging ahead for the next three years at least on a new hosting plan.

I will have to shut down for a bit while the database moves across, so no posts are made and then lost, and I plan to move the Domain registration so the DNS servers of the internet will need a few hours when that happens to point to the right place.

Good times!!!

This will happen any day/time now.

Thanks, and see you on the other side!

Vic

Ok, I will probably start this tomorrow morning, which will be Saturday Australian Eastern Daylight Savings time. Sometime on Friday in the US etc.

Wish me luck!

Good Luck Vic

Thanks man, about to start the process!

And......we're back again!!!

More lessons learned, and if a certain tech support agent was more helpful we'd have been back hours ago but I needed to go to sleep. The database was being strange but a new tech guy got it sorted this morning and it worked right away.

I will endevour to do some software updates on the board now that I'm on the new host as well.

Great Job

Thanks man, still some things to do, but we'll get there!

Ok, trying to do some simple things has caused the board to literally crash on me, so I learnt some lessons on not doing ANYTHING!

The software is a fair few versions behind, so I will try to address that, with advice, in the near future, and then try to get some of the extensions working.

For now I'll just let us post!

I think I might try another new look. This look is one where I painstakingly adjusted the colours to suit. I have found another that has a pink default and is more updated so it sounds like the way to go, and should be a refreshing change.

I like this style, and the one before it was also cool. Let's see what this new style brings.

I won't do it super soon, it would be good to chill for a bit.

Ok guys and gals, it's November and three years since the last hosting move for cheaper prices, and, you guessed it, it's happening again!!!

Luckily for me and my stress levels my new host will be doing all the migrating using their actual skills in this process, so there shouldn't be much if any downtime this time!!!

That's a win in my book.

Apparently it's happening right now, so we'll see how it goes.

Aaaaaand were back!!!!! Phew....that didn't go as smoothly as planned......I wasn't stressed out during the process, it just took longer than it should have, mainly for the weird way they do their migrations.

More lessons learned, and now for some stability for the next four years, this is a 48 month hosting plan, so we won't be doing this until at least 2029.

Ok, there is a database error when replying to posts. The information still gets posted but then the error pops up.

Hopefully I can fix it without making things worse!

So basically ignore the error as your post gets posted, which you can see when you go back and refresh.

Ok, it looks like after a LOT of help from Copilot, error after error, I got the board back and you should be able to do a reply without an error!

I do need to do an update/cleanup so I'll look into that in the future and probably use Copilot when things go wrong. It's good at working out the issue now that I have remembered/learned a few more things about PHPBB and MYSQL. Ah, the fun and games.

I've been doing some cleanups and repairs on the Extensions that I use here to make this place cooler and I am pretty ready now to do the first major board update since about 2020!!

So the board will be unavailable for a time while the update goes on, nothing to worry about, we'll be back, better than ever!!

VVF Forever!!!

Ok, so today I did the software update and we are running the latest software, and the changes I made to the colour and style haven't seemed to work, so I will keep looking into it.

Otherwise, we are up and running and stable!

Ok, so I've been updating the look back to what we're used to and it's almost there.

The best thing to do is press Ctrl+F5, which tells your browser to pull down the freshest version of a website, otherwise it keeps giving you old stuff in your cache and you may not see things properly.

Enjoy the Xmas countdown time at the VVF!