The Forum Is Moving

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Mon Jan 02, 2023 4:08 am

Hi, all. It's been a while since we've talked about the forum itself, here.

We're running up on the end of our contract with our current hosting provider, and we will be moving everything to a new provider this week. Quite frankly, I got swamped this Christmas season with stuff to do, and I wish I'd done this months ago... but life gets in the way, and I'm currently working two jobs to make ends meet.

Anyway, some things you'll need to know:

The drop-dead date is Jan 10. After that, this Invision forum will no longer exist.

We will be switching to phpBB. Your posts and messages will be converted to phpBB. However, custom formatting in posts won't be converted to BBCode. (I may work more on that later.)

The forums will be unavailable for at least a day while we run the conversion and move the domain to the new hosting company.

Some site features will take a little longer to convert.
1. Downloads may take a few days to bring back up to speed. Don't worry - your uploads are not lost; they just need to be transferred to a new file structure and new links created in the new forum database.
2. The "Try It Now" feature is not making it to the new forum. If someone wants to volunteer to update it and can make a 1-year commitment to maintain it as new versions of the emulator are released, please DM @Cyber
3. Posts may not look all that great at first, and embedded images will not appear inline. If you have "How To" or instructional guides on the forum, feel free to edit them to fix formatting and inline images.

To use the new forum, you will need to reset your password. When you see the new site with the new appearance, you will not be able to log in for the first time. Use the "forgot password" link to reset your password.

Again, there will be a short interruption of service mid-week, as we switch over to the new software. This is expected, and I'll post status updates on Discord and the Facebook site before and after the DNS transfer has taken place.

If you have questions or comments, feel free to drop them here. (We are not taking suggestions at this point, but we'll be happy to answer what questions we can.)

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Thu Jan 05, 2023 6:17 am

Update:

The domain transfer is in progress. That means the current (Invision) forum will no longer be accessible. I am disabling posting on Invision, until the domain switches over to phpBB.

You can find the new forums at ~~https://cx16forums.net.~~ https://cx16forum.com. They will not actually be available until late Thursday, since I need to re-run the data conversion after downloading the database from this site.

Thank you all for your patience, and see you soon!

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Fri Jan 06, 2023 9:27 am

Update: the domain transfer has started. I'm expecting to hear back Friday or early next week.

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Sat Jan 07, 2023 8:53 pm

Here's where we are at:
1. The domain transfer is underway. LiquidSix (the old provider) has received the transfer request, but has not fulfilled it yet.
2. Messages are (I believe) all here. However, the formatting is borked on anything that used complex formatting. I will be working to resolve these issues, but that's a problem for future me.
3. Downloads are not yet up. I am working on a script today to fix this.

So on the downloads: the issue here is that Invision uses a different directory structure than phpBB. In phpBB, all the attachments live in one directory. This can cause a problem with extremely large data sets, but that's a problem for future me, as well.

Anyway, here's what I'm doing to fix this:
1. I created a map table that lists all the attachments on the system. This includes file downloads, attachments in posts, and images in posts.
2. I will write a program that copies all the Invision attachments to their new home on the phpBB forum.
3. The program will also generate SQL to to update the phpBB posts with the address of the new attachment. It also has to turn on the attachments flags in the download posts, otherwise they just don't show up.
4. Then I get to upload all the attachments and run the SQL scripts on the server here.

I'll update this post when downloads are working.

Commander X16