WARNING: Site may be down while we make some changes

**Clinton** · 04-19-2010, 10:48 AM

New users don't have access to settings so can't change their time zone, profile or other settings.

I'm going to keep it that way as there are about 20-30 new registrations everyday who seem to be here for no reason except to create a profile with a linkback to their spammy site. If they can't edit their profiles they can't create any links (but can't change clock/time zone either). My apologies to those new users who are here for genuine reasons. If that's you, please drop me a PM or email after you've made a few posts and I can manually approve you for those permissions.

Once a new user completes 10 posts of a reasonable quality and completes 30 days of membership, they'll be automatically upgraded to some limited access of their settings, e.g. they can control the clock/preferred time zone.

To address previous feedback on searching: search function should now be working better. In a few days it should be 100%.

**Clinton** · 05-10-2010, 08:27 PM

Most things seem to be working fine with the update. But I discovered today there's an issue with moderator privileges. Any moderator having problems with this, please drop me a PM or email. Thanks.

**ruymbeke** · 05-25-2010, 07:59 PM

Sent by email at 06:06 PM 5/10/2010:

Hi Clinton,
Thanks for the update.
Do you know that the forum upgrade did break all the references to the forum posts ?
Inlcuding links to other posts within the forum, which reduces significantly the use of the forum.
It also breaks all the references from other forums and indexes from search engines.
Is it possible to freeze (read only access) the old forum and still make it available for reference and start a new one ?
What was the reason to migrate the forum from phpBB to vBulletin ?
Do you still have a snapshoot of the old forum ?
Thanks,
Gilles

PS: sorry for my late feedback, I should have mention this much sooner... (I have been quite busy travelling...)

**Clinton** · 05-27-2010, 08:58 PM

Hi Gilles,

Sorry for the delayed reply. I was hunting for your email which seems to have slipped through. I've recovered it and have a detailed reply in draft which I will send you in due course. Thanks so much for that feedback. We had to move because the old forum software was very, very old and very insecure. Keeping the spam at bay was a huge task. Not to mention hammering from the bots. These forums would normally need just a basic shared hosting but I had to move to a dedicated server to cope with the load. All that stuff is back under control now in a major way. And long-suffering Harry (who never complained, BTW) now finds he has several more free hours every week.

I was very reluctant to make any major change - I'm not the changing type of guy

and while some of the drawbacks of moving were anticipated, some weren't and I'm working to fix them. Yes, I do have a safe copy of the old database.

More in the email. It's a long weekend here so please bear with me if that spills over to Tuesday or so. There's some other stuff I wanted to chat with you about that's best left to email.