Patience While the Forum is Being Fixed

Ok, so a few things to cover...

I'm not sure how many of you are still using this thing, however, as I mentioned in the shoutbox, I'm down to host this thing indefinitely as it just runs alongside other websites I run (like my wife's business, few personal sites, my blog (that i hardly use) etc. So! The site isn't planned on going anywhere anytime soon so feel free to continue to use it actively or passively for archive sake.

The webserver hosting the site was compromised a couple months ago. It was caught immediately and the whole server was taken offline by my security system running. It did it's job! When I brought things back up with upgraded versions of PHP & mySQL, unfortunately, XenForo was NOT having it and crashed out (per the gnarly page you've all seen the last bit when you visited the site). Due to the COVID crap, I was heavily focused on work and remote workers for the company I work for so I could only step through fixing the site little by little.

The site has been moved from my old FreeBSD farm (along with 14 other sites) out to my spiffy Ubuntu 18 server running in Azure and the mods I made to the system to co-exist some older code (safe stuff) with the new stuff seems to be working quite well with a few exceptions. So far things seem to be pretty stable and I'm working on cleaning up some of the old code that doesn't work so well and replacing it with new code in an attempt to modernize some of this backend. If it doesn't work, I may not be above upgrading this thing which could potentially bring about it's own issues, lmao.

In the mean time, there *will* be some glitches that I'll try to fix but it will take a little bit of time so that means I'll be poking around more on the forum as well as trying to keep an eye on things that are being reported as broken. Some things may get fixed quick, some may take some time... It's a process, but thankfully I've got the skillset to repair most of this and bring it up to date.

If you've got any specific questions on stuff I haven't covered here, feel free to ask away so that everyone is aware.

Thanks for the updates "in plain english" so I can get a better appreciation for what you do! At least it's no extra burden or cost to run the site along side of everything you've got anyway.

In terms of updating the site, I'm not sure if you visit ToyotaNation, but I believe they are on the latest and greatest xenforo now, converting over from vbulletin recently.

You bet! There's so much that goes on within the backend of these servers sometimes that people don't know about. It's rough but in the 20+ years I've been doing this sort of IT work I've been able to develop the skill of explaining what's going on behind the scenes pretty decently. Give the 5000' view and if folks wanna drill down with questions, the table is open, haha, just be ready for those answers.

As for ToyNat, I haven't visited there but will check it out... I've got a few forums I lurk in but got so busy with stuff I ended up not being able to contribute as much as I'd like to publicly.

yeah I only mention TN so you can get a look into what modern Xenforo looks like. Your wise experienced IT brain would probably be able to put the pieces of that backend together better than mine lol, just to get an idea of maybe the steps and process to upgrade if needed

Heard this bad boy was up and running again. Nice!

oh snap it's mack

Oh snap! Gotta fix my photobucket it looks like

well there ain't no fixing photobucket. I had deleted all of my pics and accounts for my sig stuff because I thought the forums were all dead and gone lol

I had been getting emails telling me to update it but I never did, because I as well figured it was never coming back lol

Well... happy to surprise you all?

test 1
Added: Jan 5, 2021 5:16 AM
test 2
Added: Jan 5, 2021 5:16 AM
hahahaah I did it! doublepost merge works again.

Ok, user registration is fixed and email notifications (password resets) is working properly again. Thanks for the access increase Gold, it helped a metric ton in getting these squashed out and getting some of the archaic code behind the scenes fixed.

Ok, so update on the notifications. The inner workings are great, most email flows correctly but if your service provider is using SpamHaus it'll be a few days before it's working 100%. Evidently the IP MSFT assigned this Azure instance must have been used by a dirtbag spammer at one point, lol. I had to submit to remove the IP from their list so once that's sorted out we should be 100%. I'll say based on the fact it's only on one single SH list it'll probably affect only a few folks. If your email is hosted on O365 or the Public version of that (outlook.com/hotmail/whatever its called now) then you'll definitely not get the notifications from the server til this is fixed. Gmail, for instance, is unaffected.