a little update....

i now have my phone blow up and go ape shit with alarms if the site goes down......and when that happens, i immediately have to contact the hosting company so they can tap into my server and see exactly whats going on because log files are apparently not kicking back enough info.

mind you this happens at odd hours of the night as well.....site went down this morning at about 130am....and they were able to find something, but i dont consider it the source.

i'm going to be doing a large upgrade on the software that hosts this site. there wont be much of difference anyone will notice, but the important thing is that it will fix it or be a process of elimination to the suspects that might be the cause of the problem(s).

I made a copy of this site and I have successfully upgraded it, but it took several (7-8) hours since this site isnt an out of the box install. in this case, the saying goes "the more you customize, the worse it upgrades".....that being said, the site will be down during this period as well. I dont know yet when I will do the upgrade. I need 8 hours of uninterrupted time.

so if the site kicks back a message that its down for the upgrade, you guys will know whats up.

8 hours huh? ok try 10pm to 6am

Funny Ralph, I was gonna sugest the same thing

are you gunna stay up and help me?

wouldn't be the first time we had a late night

Brad does that mean its a fix that YOU actually have to do, not a dealio that you can start and let it run its course Curiosity, bud, dont know much about these things, as I'm sure you can tell

the upgrade of the software takes about 20 minutes if that and is automated.

whats a pain in the ass is then upgrading all the other crap...like the gallery, map, chat, bookmarks, etc. all the add-ons. they all have to be re-tweeked and modified to work cuz some of them havent been updated to work with the new version....not to mention this theme, the lovely brown theme....will have to be tweeked to work with the new version as well. Theres a new version of the chat software thats out, so i will upgrade that while im at it. i already upgraded the gallery yesterday, but will have to re-bridge it into the spine of this site (notice it links your uploaded pics to your profile).....its all the small things.

if you notice at the bottom, very bottom of this page, we are at 1.1.1. this version came out 3 years ago. the current version is 1.1.11. theres 2.0 coming out soon and i'll have to do this all over again when that comes out.

the plus side to all of this is that in the test version i was able to get the re-capcha to work (the thing where you type in the letters you see during register) so the amount of spammers will decline.

not many people understand what it takes to build this shit. yeah, anyone can drop some forum software on a server and point a domain at it....but in order to make it unique, flow smoothly and make it user friendly and inviting is the trick. ive put many many hours into this place to try to incorporate many features, but keep it seamless.

dont worry, the entire site and database will be backed up in the event shit goes sideways so i can roll back and go back to the drawing board.

So am I reading into this that we can help expedite the process somewhat by each of us clearing out old PM's, Bookmakrs, etc?

Ray