Forum tech information

I'm just closing the forum down for half an hour chaps while I sort sommat out....

Forum search feature now back up and running, apologies for the downtime the past couple of days.

Server is undergoing a security upgrade sometime between Tues 10th March 10pm and Wed 11th March 8am. May be losses of connectivity between those times, sorry!

Before anyone asks 'where has my signature gone' I've just changed some code for forum viewing to limit the display of signatures to the poster's first view on the page only.

While forum users have been very good at using standard and uniform sized banners, some users are piling up high. While it looks very nice it does mean post text relative to graphics is somewhat unbalanced and makes text a tad difficult to follow down the page.

This modification should give the best of both worlds (but don't overdo the sigs, eh? )

Apologies for the downtime over lunch today - some sort of connectivity issue. Frankly, I think THEY are on to us, clearly 'Off Topic' is getting a bit too edgy...

Sorry, connection problems between here and Germany data centre again causing outage for 45 mins or so today.
I suspect either some techie is being overly 'green' by turning everything of while he pops off to lunch or someone is making their job indispensable.

Edit: "Our engineers have located the problem and it has been pinpointed to a UPS issue"
Ah the irony - an Uninteruptable Power Supply interupted the service.

Apologies to those who were greeted by blank pages this morning. I had a massive attack on the server during the night that filled with server with GBs of log files and as a consequence things started falling over then finally not functioning.

After clearing all the crap out everything was functioning apart form this forum. I had a horrible feeling the db was corrupted but after clearing out tonnes of redundant/lost temp files from the phpBB cache all now seems to be well. Fingers crossed.

Apologies, yet another DoS attack overnight brought the server to its knees - hopefully all back up and running now...

Sorry for the server (not forum) crash - unfortunately I was away at Beltring for three days having a great time and in no position to poke under the bonnet, tut a bit, then firmly slap the top of the box (which usually does the trick).

Anyhoo, a quick bath then three quarters of an hour later everything seems fine so I'm switching the forum back on as of midnight, Sunday 27th.

I'll have to face my various client's wrath on Monday - meanwhile I hope the forum users made good use of the downtime and did something useful...

Sharp-eyed forum users may have noticed a change across the forum the past few days. OK, you didn't.

We now have a much larger team of moderators who have all responded to a call for volunteers and now share responsibility for moderating the forum with the CiA team.
Each person has their own section to look after so as not to over-burden any one person. The 13 moderators are all active players as well as forum users.

This forum has always had a policy of a 'light touch' and nothing will change, indeed I don't expect that forum users will notice any increase in moderator intervention. What they may notice is that things might be a bit neater and questions get answered a bit quicker. Incidentally, no change with group sections, airsoft site sections or retailers sections - these all remain moderated by the section 'owners' themselves.

The benefit to Comrades in Arms is that there are more eyes watching every corner of the forum and that more people are actively involved, which has to be a good thing.

So, thank you for volunteering your services gents, much appreciated.

P.S. Moderator's forum names appear in blue and the full list of mods can be seen here: memberlist.php?mode=group&g=3

When I was away on holiday for a few days I resolved not to pop into internet cafes (or plug the laptop the laptop into the non-broadband phone line and try and get the modem working) just to check 'how the forum was doing'.

I was using my Blackberry-type mobile for checking work emails of course and there came a point where I thought "I wonder what the CiA forum is like on a mobile" on the pretext of a technical idle thought (but really I was unable to stop myself 'popping in').

Anyhoo, the upshot was it was very frustrating - slow to load and rubbish layout on screen, so I resolved to look into seeing if things could be improved. Well, the answer - rather surprisingly - is that there is no official phpBB3 method of doing it. But there were two ways it could be done (in a way I was technically comfortable with).

The first I have now made the first steps to get running. You will see in your User Control Panel an optional board style under Board preferences called STG-Mobile. This is especially configured for use on small screen and is graphically light for speedy page loading. It is easiest to switch forum style before you go anywhere otherwise you will have a couple of ordinary slow screens to navigate to get to the UCP setting screen.

The next stage of implementation will be to get the system to auto-detect the platform you are viewing the forum from and so will automatically switch forum styles, which will save faffing.

So, if you are as sad as me and can't do without the forum when are away from a PC then why not give it a whirl?

P.S. I have also been playing with a nifty commercial solution which seems to work well called Tapatalk. http://www.tapatalk.com Unfortunately it only works for the iPhone although they are working on moving it to other platforms in the future. The downside is that you have to pay 3 dollars for the 'app' although that ain't much at all.
Please DON'T pay for the App as I have the system turned off at the moment since I don't have an iPhone to thoroughly evaluate the implementation and I thought a solution for all mobile users might be more useful to start with.

Advance notice of forum outage.

This server will be migrated to a new data centre on Monday 16th November 2009. The server will be shut down some time after 6pm and be up and running by 6am the following morning - the actual outage time should be fairly limited though.

Although the IP address will be changing you won't need need to change bookmarks or make any other changes.

As above, server will be down 1800 hrs today and up by 0600 Tuesday, all being well.

Well, it was all going so well! The server move to a new data centre appeared to have gone smoothly but somehow connectivity got lost around 1530hrs Tuesday. Rolled back to the backup before the move and so lets try again.

Sorry for the down time. The server move was from Germany back to the UK so its nice to see we haven't lost the tradition of things half-working and technicians on extended lunch and coffee breaks and so unable to lift a finger to help!

Forum will go off-line sometime this morning as I do some updates - sorry for the inconvenience.

Notice:

Sometime over the Easter weekend I'll be taking the forum off-line for a few hours for essential maintenance and upgrades, sorry for the inconvenience.

Forum now upgraded and back online.

Next job is to restore the CiA look and feel, in the meantime I'm afraid you will have to put up with the default scheme.

Please forgive various anomalies with bits and bobs not functioning as they should do.
I'm making changes with the forum live so as not to deprive you for longer than necessary.

Forum upgrade is now complete (first major one since Dec 2008 so rather over due ). Issue with errors on new registrations is now resolved so after six hours work I think all is hunky dory now.
Should you notice anything untoward then do please drop me a PM and I'll take look at the problem.