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I was getting used to the new one. Dont mind either way. Bit to all invloved as I know what is onvlived in upgrades and what can and does go wrong.
Cheers,
Andrew.
Cheers,
Andrew.
2008 NS Diesel Auto - stock as a rock. Planning Tow bar, dual battery system, cargo barrier, bullbar, winch, lights, roof rack and suspension.
Jayco Starcraft 17.58-3.
Yay. A format that i can use easy.
Find last page easy.
Click on last topics on any page. No navigating round heaps of cfap to get what i want.
Thanks.
I typed up a long reply last night but got an error and didn't let me post. Can't be bothered saying most of it again.
I'm glad this old one is back, I prefer it. Dave mentioned part of the upgrade reason was security issues.. Be good if the board makers can just put the security on this version.
'99 NL Escape, Manual - Bullbar, roofrack, cargo barrier, D697LT, Tough Dogs, dual batts, rear draws, Narva 225 HID, UHF, led bar etc
Towing: 4.8m Savage Centurion half-cab w/75hp Mariner
'99 NL GLS SWB, Auto - Bullbar, D697LT, spotties, UHF, Koni adjustables & King springs.
2008 VRX 25TH anniversary with lots of extras
GONE! 1997 NK Pajero turbo diesel GLX 31" Maxxis bighorns/2'Lift/ARB Winchbar/ warn x9000/ IPF 900 Spots/GME UHF and a Jesus bar.
We would have got used to the new version, but when it doesn't work forget it.
Thanks for having the Guts to revert to the old version.
2013 NW GLX-RFactory Locker, TC mod,Dual Battery, 240V inverter, Anderson Plug, Fire Extinguisher.GME TX3500 UHF Radio, MM Alloy Bar, ORU 12000lb Winch,EGR mod, Fancy wheels, 33" Pirelli ATR Tyres, LRA Aux tank, Custom bash plates & Rock sliders, Ultra Gauge, ARB Compressor, LED Light bar, little mods around the cabin. Kings Std Ratecoils & Ultimate Shocks, Firestone HP airbags, Airteck Snorkel, Hema 6. Towing: Starcraft outback
yes good onya for trying to lift the game. Unfortunately it seems that the product was not up to what the masses wanted.
I was willing to wait and see how it all turned out, but honestly I reckon it was an uphill battle. When I first loaded the new version on the phone things looked promising, but the more I used it the more I had issues. I wish things worked out the way it was envisaged but things dont always go as planned!
we have an awesome group of people here with a vast knowledge base. It was somewhat disheartening to see some saying that they would probably not be hanging around because of the change.
I'm sure there will be a way to keep the forum up to date without compromising the friendliness of what we have now.
'99 NL Escape, Manual - Bullbar, roofrack, cargo barrier, D697LT, Tough Dogs, dual batts, rear draws, Narva 225 HID, UHF, led bar etc
Towing: 4.8m Savage Centurion half-cab w/75hp Mariner
'99 NL GLS SWB, Auto - Bullbar, D697LT, spotties, UHF, Koni adjustables & King springs.
I typed up a long reply last night but got an error and didn't let me post. Can't be bothered saying most of it again.
I'm glad this old one is back, I prefer it. Dave mentioned part of the upgrade reason was security issues.. Be good if the board makers can just put the security on this version.
Sadly it doesn't really work that way. As security holes/exploits are found, one fixes them. But this comes with version changes, and part of those version changes are "enhancements".
Versions are normally made up of major version, minor version and patch level.
Right now this forum is vBulletin 3.8.3
The one that was upgraded to was in the 5s. That's a fair whack of a jump.
Don't even get me on upgrade path.
I have a customer using SugarCRM. They didn't upgrade for ages, and when I did, I had to find a safe upgrade path to jump two major version levels. After 6 hours of backing up, upgrading, testing, backing up, upgrading, testing, I ended up having to roll them back two minor levels for things to work properly. Doing the upgrade on a test system didn't help - I can't get them upgraded any further cleanly without paid support from Sugar and that's problematic as the local Sugar consultants are IDIOTS and useless, their techs crap - so the only way forward would be to get support from Sugar directly and that has the problem of time zones and such.
Jumping two major versions on a live system was always going to be a very high risk - and this isn't even in a commercial setting, so it means the money/time has to come from somewhere...
It's a hard call having to roll back but it seems to have been a good call. Yes now the security holes are back but that's life I guess - for now...
1994 NJ GLS Auto, 3.0 LPG, 31s, HD springs, 50mm body lift, Firestone rear air bags
1993 NH GLS Manual, 3.0 LPG, 31s, Iron Man Torsion and Coils, Lovells Shocks, 30mm body lift, Manual Hubs, Extractors and god awful droning 2.5" exhaust
In case any of your are interested this is a brief rundown on how the last few days went behind the scenes.
Last week we took a copy of the current forum and set it up test site (ie exact copy of everything in the current forum) and upgraded it (takes about 2 hours to run). Dave and I spent many hours going through it and "unfixing" all the automatic upgrade changes etc. Each new version of vBulletin requires new skins, new logo, change to pay layout etc. Fun fun.
In the end and with the mobile part seeming to work quite well (ie responsive) we decided to pull the pin and go for the overall site upgrade and then work through fine tuning all the things we hadn't fixed already and get new skin etc. Interesting we'd not seen any performance issues with only a couple of us on the new upgraded test forum and server performance (ie avg CPU time) had not changed.
Sunday night we make the change. Pretty quickly (well straight away) we notice that with only about 50 people viewing the forum the server performance dies (ie we hit 100% CPU usage). Damn! Having been down this path many times before with all sorts of different upgrades that offer new features but require more power/tweaking we tried to do some quick optimisation of the database. That didn't work because we had no free CPU time left.
Luckily we are using AWS (Amazon Web Services) out of Sydney for the server so we stopped the server and changed it to a new instance type (c1.xlarge) with 20 times more CPU (ecu's) than the current server (m1.small) and 4 times the RAM. This proved successful and everything hummed along nicely with only a few hundred people online in the early hours of Monday morning.
Monday brought with it chance to determine that our upgraded server was going to break the bank and given that it was sitting on only about 20% CPU avg we could downgrade to something with half the specs (still 5 times faster than the old server though). We did this and also enabled memcache (big performance improvements for frequent database queries) plus run all the optimisation we could for the db. Apart from many issues with the interface, old posts not showing (because of a silly default limit to only show 20 pages) and many other missing things that everyone had gotten used to but didn't seem to be in the new version we started having issues with the db (mysql) crashing. Argghhhh. Having spent way to many hours tweaking mysql conf files in the past i was pretty confident that I'd be able to fix this problem up pretty easy. Not to be. Seemed that under some circumstance that I never worked out mysql would crash no matter how much RAM we threw at it or buffer and cache sizes we threw at it.
Two days of that and time to move back to the trusty old version!
So options from here (no hurry) are to stick with exactly what we have (minor upgrade to latest 3.8 version sometime), upgrade to version 4 (some improvements over 3 but apparently not too much different) or go for the 5 upgrade again sometime when it's either better or we have more time to tweak it to our needs. If we are to do either of the 4 or 5 upgrade I reckon we'll create seperate site and let a larger group give it a thurough test to avoid the dramas of this time.
Thanks for all the feedback and hopefully we can avoid any of these dramas moving forward from the tech side of things!
Stewart
PS..If any of you are web designers with experience in skin/theme design (you can learn vBulletin skins pretty easy) then let Dave or I know. Some improvements to the design would not go astray in the current or any future version.
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