I've just posted a sticky announcing that I'll be moving the forum/web site to a new server on Friday evening. If all goes to plan all should be up and running by lunchtime on Saturday. Sorry about that, but it has to be done.
Good points - while I doubt there will be anything noticeable to the punter (speed of data delivery hasn't been an issue on the current server and I don't think speed improvement will be noticeable) it will bring big technical improvements:
MySQL will be under my control - database server restarts will be easy and the database server isn't shared with other users.
I can offer unlimited bandwidth.
Should it be necessary I can reboot the whole server.
Bulk emailing will return.
Whole server tape backup is under my control.
Bad points? I'll have to double the membership fee for the punters. 
All sounds good to me! 
Wunderbar
absolutely no idea what we're on about here Stbf, but will support you to the last man , last bullet ect .
Hmm, took me until 3am this morning but all looks OK (fingers crossed). Good job I'm not too well and have a poor sleeping pattern!
Tech note for Richard: This new server is running MySQL 5.2.22 (previous one was 3.23.56) and I did run into migration problems - I don't know whether it was due to this or not. I ended up importing table by table into the DB just to be sure each was OK. The only one that played up was one of the search tables - I'm hoping that will be rebuilt when the search function is used....
The wiki tables were a different matter - each came up with a problem along the lines of illegal characters or line length too long. As I didn't know what to do about it I have not imported any of the wiki tables into the DB. Suggest that when/if we get round to building the wiki properly we start again and we might as well run that from a separate DB - I don't think there is a technical advantage of combining them anyway?
good stuff on the new MySQL...
I'll take a look at the search stuff when I have chance.
If you send me the wiki db backups then I may be able to migrate them to the new server at some point.
Nicely done.
Not that ive got a fucking clue what you're talking about.... 
When we were a Kingdom it was run by a King
When we were an Empire it was run by an Empress
Now we're a country we're run by a..........
What happened to all the welcome stickied stuff ?
And WTF is the list of people booked in for the training day ?
Yes, there have been a few weird outcomes. From my digging it seems that it come from the upgrade to MySQL 5 - one of the weird things is that text following a £ symbol gets truncated and has something to do with character sets. I'm going to set up a dummy phpBB forum on my last remaining old server site and set the old board up there - hopefully can copy and paste missing stuff back again....
I didn't like ot complain , however i was going ot ask if there was any way we could retrieve some of the more usefull stuff.
hmmm lets see ££ check ££ testing!
ok... good £ does work...
yes, you're right on your assumptions Dave... hmmm...
no richard, it gets truncated on import/upgrade, not new posting!
yes... but worth checking it does still work... which it does!
I've been trying to look at the db, but it seems that phpMyAdmin is still pointing me at the old database.
What are the new connection details? (username/password/ip address)
never mind... found them
ok dave... phpmyadmin is now set up so you can view both the old and new databases and copy stuff over.
I've already re-instated the training day booking list.
If there are any other posts that need fixing then post the links to them on here and I'll look at them when I can.
Ah, good job. I've got phpAdmin open on the new and old servers but cant see both on one!? Could you post a link please?
http://ww2airsoft.org.uk/php/phpMyAdminWW2/index.php
make sure you're logged out...
You'll see there is a drop down list box at the bottom that allows you to select the server to connect to.
ok dave... phpmyadmin is now set up so you can view both the old and new databases and copy stuff over.
I've already re-instated the training day booking list.
If there are any other posts that need fixing then post the links to them on here and I'll look at them when I can.
Can you please check the "Welcome ot the forum stuff" ?
Can you please check the "Welcome to the forum stuff" ?
Done.