A sneak peek behind the curtain at my Administration Control Panel:



The bastids at phpBB are messin' with me. Here's their announcement.

So we'll be off the air for a brief time tomorrow morning bright and early. I'll also optimize the database again, and do some muttering and puttering, like I do.

Please keep your arms and legs inside the forum at all times.

Um, can we hold off until Saturday? Tomorrow, Jan 6th, is a special day and I'd hate to see an unexpected hiccup occur during the upgrade resulting in extended downtime.

Sure, boss. Saturday works, too. Yeah, tomorrow is a special day.

Oh thank goodness. I'm happy that we have an absolute dictator who cares about all our little requests!

And.

A dicktator who sees how the needs of the many outweigh the needs of his board.

How long has this new edition of the software been in use? Unless a piece of software on my computer is acting up, I wait a bit before updating. Very often what I then download is version xx.01, reflecting a patch for an error discovered in the first couple of weeks. Sometimes it looks as if a software provider is using the user community for its beta test. (Not true for Microsoft updates, which are often responses to threats in the wild.)

Excellent question.

The phpBB team is a group of volunteers. They do a hell of a job, and part of the job they do is rigorous testing. They have a bug tracker, a projects tracker, a security tracker, and a development wiki. You should click that link in the first post and follow along with them.

The main reason to upgrade is what they say at that link:

When you need support, you need it NOW. Their support is very responsive and I've received a lot of expert help. One time, I somehow had a square bracket "[" where it should have been a curly bracket "{" and that broke my code. A guy on their support team found it and saved my bacon.

I've never had a problem with updating the software, except that one time way back when (Jan. 2010). I *think* I forgot to lock the board, and somebody posted right in the middle of the upgrade, and that corrupted the whole database. I've spent one hell of a lot of time studying and learning about phpBB since then; when I joined PJ, I didn't have any idea how to make it so you could embed a YouTube. It's been a long learning curve, but I'm really good at this stuff now. I've done at least 5 upgrades since that awful day (it cost me $175 to get GoDaddy to restore the forum, and we lost a day's worth of posts, the most brilliant posting day in PJ/Fogbow history), and every single one of those upgrades has worked smoothly. I have a routine, and it works. It starts, of course, with backing up everything in case of a problem.

I remember that day. I posted a TON of great stuff

Oh, you did not!

I developed a one line equation for calculating every prime number and posted it that day. Now I cannot remember what I did.

Thanks. That makes sense to me. The Linux community model produces very reliable software, and the need for support is crystal clear. (If Microsoft had that rule in place, there would be a People's Revolution, but they do not quite do that. They still provide patches to Windows Vista, for example. It is said that a slim majority of Windows users are still using XP!. Windows 2000 and you're out of luck. )

My employer is still using Windows XP and Office 2007.

Someone's due for an Epiphany?

Somebody PM me with the backup plan.

thank you, foggy.

Anything for you, my love. Don't post anything there that you want to see ever again, is the only warning.

It's a whole 'nother forum, set up by me and Bob Ross. If I ever decide that I'm having trouble with phpBB, I can import the entire Fogbow database into the Birther Debunkers Forum, and it has a lot of bells and whistles that phpBB doesn't. It's the ultimate backup of backups, meaning that if the whole dang Fogbow forum goes POOF and I can't get it back, there's already another forum set up so we don't miss a beat.

Bob Ross has an active forum that uses this software (called IP Board). I forgets the link, but you'll see what I mean by bells and whistles if you visit.

The title made me think you were going all JimRob, and starting a quarterly grift-a-thon.

Have to say that was my first guess, too. Also.

Funny you should mention ...

Contributions have dropped off remarkably. Possibly my fault, for contracting that loathsome disease that damn near killed me. Maybe everybody's tapped out after the holidays.

Please note that every dime since Nov. 1 has gone toward document acquisition, and not my petty little health problems, which I'm more than capable of dealing with from here on out.

Nevertheless, "every dime" means I was able to send Jack Ryan $175 on Dec. 9, and I now have $126.57 in the account. That's not up to our previous contribution level, to say the least.

It's great to have transcripts of birther hearings and copies of documents from the court files, but they cost money and Jack is no more a wealthy man than I am. We hate to beg, but ...

Is that a "donate or the dog forum dies" threaty thing?

Did this happen today? It was painless if it did.

I was a little slow starting all the backups. I realized it had been a while since I backed up the entire file structure instead of just the database. And I run other websites that must also be backed up. I'll give it another shot tomorrow. It should be quite painless, but I'm going to be offline for a little extra time as I optimize the database.