Maintenancing

[shiney]

Doing some server maintenance, there may be periods of downtime. If this happens please go hug a homeless person or something

[Krylo]

But then I'd have to take a shower.

[shiney]

I think we all agree it's the homeless person who would then need a shower.

[Flarecobra]

Well, there's always the car wash.

[Overcast]

So have someone trying to register. Aside from me looking awkwardly at you folks for expecting new people to find Brian's name in the forums, it also seems like the website is down for everyone in the world except us. I dunno if it is the new people thread or something like that, but would maintainancing have anything to do with this.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.nuklearforums.com/

[shiney]

It was down for everyone, registrar shenanigans. As you can see this is no longer the case.

[shiney]

Some SQL stuff hap'nin, we're working on a more permanent solution. Might have some more downtime over the next few days but we'll try to keep it to a minimum.

[Flarecobra]

If I could, I'd get y'all a drink for the work you do for us.

[shiney]

synk did the lion's share, I just brought it back up afterward.

[phil_]

????????????

Edit: The announcement is full of lies and other lies.

[Krylo]

??????

?

Edit: Yup. Damnit Synk.

[shiney]

No longer does the announcement lie, mostly.

[Aldurin]

?????????

EDIT: Shit, my question marks are still question marks.

[synkr0nized]

No longer does the announcement lie, mostly.

It wouldn't let me make it for a day only, so yeah it was still up despite being full of lies.
I need to get into doing this another time when I can properly focus on it. But I'll fuck with it on a test copy first and then properly port NPF over.


Basically, our AJAXChat stuff is UTF-8, but the vBulletin elements of the database are Latin-1. The server itself is UTF-8. So the database needs to be converted. That's what I set out to do when the database server and I had a falling out and it decided to play the silent game with me and stop talking. But this also meant it stopped talking to NPF. shiney rode in on a horse in his shining armor and saved everyone.


It will still probably be best to put the forum on "offline mode" while doing that, so that new posts and stuff aren't added while the back end is getting tinkered with. But that should happen without causing things to shit the bed and you all to have a broken site for the whole day like today.

Apologies, all.

---------- Post added at 09:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:08 AM ----------

As a head's-up, I have tested this on an offline server of mine with a copy of the forum, and it appears to check out without issue. Granted, I have not looked extensively through any threads, but it I was able to post and browse the forum as normal. I even posted some Japanese without fuss.

So soon I will probably be taking the forum offline again to perform this update for real. In addition, there are a couple of vBulletin security patches I'll take the opportunity to apply given that they require the forum to be taken offline anyway. They have no effect on forum features or stability, so unfortunately there will be no visible change.

I will post another forum-wide announcement a little ahead of time, and then you'll see that "The forums are offline" message again.

Hopefully without any "Database error" messages to follow.

[Krylo]

Looking forward to the forums being broken for another day or two.

[akaSM]

Aww, I missed this. Did anything explode?

[Krylo]

Aww, I missed this. Did anything explode?

Yes.