Software Upgrade

[jon]

The discussion forum software was updated overnight Sunday night. You should not see any differences, as this was a "maintenance release", fixing some "bugs", including a number of security problems that have been discovered over the last 6 months since we last updated the software.

As I've said before, doing these updates is quite important because the release of a new "maintenance release" means the publication of the security flaws in the previous release, which hackers read to see if they can find any ways into a web site like this one.

Please let us know if you discover anything unusual with this new version of the software.

[RationalKeith]

Did the improvement hide the search function and my posts functions?

[jon]

No, the search (and My Posts, which uses the Search function) function has been disabled more recently, as part of a move to a more reliable web hosting method, where we own a virtual computer. At first, we ran into response time problems that were traced to hackers trying to overload our "virtual computer". To keep the hackers at bay, we had to automatically terminate long-running tasks. Unfortunately, building the search index is also a long-running task and gets automatically stopped long before it completes.

I'm hesitant, and also short of the time required, to temporarily turn off the mechanism that has so successfully stopped hackers in their tracks, as it would require 2-4 hours in the middle of the night or the search index build would impact general use of all our web sites by people like all of you reading this.

[jon]

I was also reminded that you can search the forum using Google:
site:radiowest.ca/forum ckvn - searches for CKVN
site:radiowest.ca/forum georgep - searches for all your posts, if your ID is georgep

[RationalKeith]

Thanks.

Need more police chasing the vermin, but politicians won't fund more.

[PMC]

The site response is alot better.. no time outs or 500 error... excellent work Jon/RF

[beddows]

I have never been entirely happy with phpbb3 which is the platform this forum is on. It is very difficult to customize. I migrated my forum (mexicorvforums.com) from this platform over to invision power board which is not free, but it migrated smoothly with all its posts intact. The admin panel in that particular platform is far easier to manage. The main reason was that I found it awkward to implement banner advertising on this platform, which made it hard to attract advertisers to cover costs, plus I was also the admin of another forum (truckcamperforums.com - a non profit) on that patform. Its the old adage of you get what you pay for.

[jon]

I have never been entirely happy with phpbb3 which is the platform this forum is on. It is very difficult to customize. I migrated my forum (mexicorvforums.com) from this platform over to invision power board which is not free, but it migrated smoothly with all its posts intact. The admin panel in that particular platform is far easier to manage. The main reason was that I found it awkward to implement banner advertising on this platform, which made it hard to attract advertisers to cover costs, plus I was also the admin of another forum (truckcamperforums.com - a non profit) on that patform. Its the old adage of you get what you pay for.

Radiofan is free to disagree, but I've been really pleased with how banner advertising works on the bottom of this site. The automatic upgrade feature of phpBB3 has gone several new versions now without any hand changes for modifications we've made, including the "mods" for the banner advertising you see at the bottom of this page.

Admittedly, a knowledge of the programming language php is essential if you want to do modifications to phpBB3.

[RationalKeith]

I see My Posts and Search both back, thanks.

[jon]

You're welcome. Details are here:
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=9064