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Switching to the new server - when?

Forest

Forest

Beloved Grand Eagle
Hello everyone,

It's been hard to watch the server outages recently. As I've mentioned elsewhere, this website has been struggling recently because it's software very much needs to be updated.

I'm in the process of building a new system with new versions of the same software. It will fundamentally be the same site, with the same people and the same content (discussions, etc), but the software itself will be much more modern.

If people would like to see the current draft of the new site, I'm hoping to start teaching people how to view it relatively soon.

Building the new site is taking time because there are so many different software programs that need to work together to make a site like this. Figuring out which programs to use, how to configure the programs to make them work together, and how to import our existing data is extremely time-consuming. In some cases, I'm going to have to hire consultants, which adds a whole new layer of complexity.

An important question is when to switch over to the new software. As a TMSer myself, my inclination is to wait until everything is absolutely perfect. However, with all of the problems we are having with the current server, I'm beginning to think that it would be better to do it sooner rather than later. I don't like the idea of so many people coming to our site and not being able to access it.

Concretely, the core of the wiki software has already been converted once and is running on my other server. Many of the things that are missing from it are relatively minor.

Three of the big things that are still missing are:
  1. Forum thread tags (click here to learn about these)
  2. Linkified keywords (automatic links that appear in posts)
  3. Bookmarks (the forum has software to help you bookmark your favorite threads)
Our core forum software doesn't have those three functionalities. They only appear on our site because a long time ago I downloaded add-ons and applied them to our site. To get them on the new site, I will have to download and configure new add-ons as well as figuring out how to get all of our old data onto the new server. This will be very time-consuming and may involve custom programming and hiring someone to custom program it.

My inclination right now is to not worry about those three add-ons until after we've switched the forum over. The outages are bad for our community, and so I think it's best to just do the switch first and then worry about the custom programming and the new add-ons later.

I wanted to get some feedback from everyone on this, though I know how important this site is to you. I also thought it was important to let you know about how the changeover will happen.

What do you think?
 
First off, i dont know if ive said this before but im a new visitor and i cant believe how much effort youre putting into this. I, and I'm sure many others are, am incredibly grateful that youre doing this just out of the goodness of your heart. There arent even any ads running, how is this server still going?

I agree that these outages are bad for the community and I think you're right: we should switch asap. Dont worry too much about keywords and thread tags. I think most of us would pick a server without thread tags over a server that barely works.

I'm immensely grateful, I can't wait to see the new forum, thanks a lot
 
Hi @Forest
Thanks for doing this, I have some idea how daunting it can be.
For myself, I do not use automatic tags - I prefer to be able to choose tags although the old version was limited to older wordings, so I don't use them often. I don't use the linkified words much for the same purpose, and personally, I bookmark things I want to save from the TMSwiki, externally from this website (create my own browser based bookmarks). So none of those features have much impact to myself. The search function has always done a great job, with or without tags.
 
Mani said:
First off, i dont know if ive said this before but im a new visitor and i cant believe how much effort youre putting into this. I, and I'm sure many others are, am incredibly grateful that youre doing this just out of the goodness of your heart. There arent even any ads running, how is this server still going?
Click to expand...

I just pay the bills myself. I don't get a tax writeoff for it because we let our 501c3IRS paperwork lapse, but I don't itemize taxes anyway. :) My TMS was the biggest thing to happen to me in my entire life, so I remember what it was like and keeping the server going seems like the least I can do. I'm tremendously grateful to the people who keep coming back to keep the discussion and support going. That's the real heart of this community. (and to Jan, who manages all of the spam)

I think the "quick conversion" is the right thing to do - I'm glad the community seems to agree. Knowing this will help me allocate my time more effectively.
 
Hi @Forest. I wholeheartedly agree with @Mani's and @Cactusflower's sentiments and comments. I'm in the UK and have been trying to get on to this thread to reply to you all day today with no luck until now, so imo the "quick conversion" is really needed and would be fantastic. You are an absolute star for providing the Wiki and forums for us all to use -- thank you!
 
Sounds good. This will likely take a week off of the process of building the server.

With that said, my best estimate is still early/mid February. Having decided not to worry about those challenging addons, I can move on from the forum and focus on the other half of the website - the actual wiki:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/forum-faqs-frequently-asked-questions.1618/#whatiswiki (Forum FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions))

Unfortunately, I can't only switch over to the new server for the forum software. I also have to switch over for the wiki software all at the same time. Transitioning over the wiki software will also be a major project.

I'll start focusing on the wiki software today, seeing if I can get that up and running on the new server. Hopefully things will go smoothly, but we can't know until we try it. Not having to worry about those three forum addons will be a big help, though, because of the program selectin/configuration/data importation/contractor selection/project management/custom code issues I mentioned above.
 
@Forest
I’m eternally grateful for your act of pure charity—your gift of time, money and effort to sustain this site. What a great person you are! So many people are helped. I agree with everyone and with you— we don’t need the extras as much as the site being reliable. Thank you so much!!!
 
Forest,
If a GoFundMe type site was set up to accept donations to cover the cost of the new software and server (or anything else), I'd certainly contribute. I'm sure others would as well. You generously volunteer your time, but there is no need for you to fund everything. I have no idea what's involved or the cost, but just want to put this out there.

Appreciate all you and Jan do to keep this site running.
 
Hey @Ellen, I'm going to offer my two cents here, although Forest may have different thoughts which he'll share when he has time. I don't mean to call you out, because I've had quite a few private messages in the last year, with the same or very similar suggestion. My response is more comprehensive than I know you need to know, because it's really aimed at everyone reading this who might have the same thought, which I'm sure encompasses many more of our community members.

As a CPA, I definitely have strong opinions about this. Surprisingly, it's easiest to start with the question of whether GoFundMe funds are taxable. If the answer is Yes, then you've immediately got a whole range of complications and compliance to worry about. And then you're back to the #1 issue which is at the heart of this project (and has been all along) which is TIME. Money can buy time, but it takes a LOT of time just to get to the point where the benefits finally exceed the costs.

To start with: "donations" to a GFM campaign are never tax-deductible to the donor/giver. NEVER. This is because a GFM is not a qualified tax-exempt charitable entity. Qualifed tax-exempt charities have a TON of compliance requirements they have to regularly meet on local and federal levels. It's not easy to keep up, and many small charities are unable to do so. We've been there, tried that.

GFM funds are not taxable to the recipient ONLY IF the funds are strictly for personal needs like disaster losses or medical costs. Even more importantly, there must be absolutely no strings attached. The funds are truly a personal gift with no expectations on how they are to be spent. There is no accountability required.

If the GFM funds are for any kind of business or creative venture (such as tmswiki.org), especially any venture in which donors expect to receive any kind of benefits at all, then the funds are 100% taxable to the recipient (unless it's a fully-qualified tax-exempt entity and again - been there, tried that, no one has the time).

And, to repeat myself, once you're receiving taxable income rather than gifts, you're looking at a whole lot of valuable time which has to be wasted on compliance. You've got business licenses and state/local taxes, federal income AND self-employment taxes, AND all of the bookkeeping required to keep track of income and expenses in order to minize all of those taxes. If you hire people to help, you've got additional reporting requirements, even for independent contractors.

I'm one of those people who was paid to spend my time on just one limited area of compliance so my clients didn't have to. Paying taxes is a loss of funds. Paying accountants and consultants is a loss of funds. Then those funds have to be made up with even more fundraising. Pretty soon you need to hire a fundraiser. Every individual you hire takes time find and hire them - never mind replacing them when they inevitably move on or can't do the job.

And this is how an economy grows - which is fine if your goal is to grow an enterprise and create jobs and enhance the economy at large. The trade-off for investing time and funds in the economic growth model is accepting the reality that searching for, vetting, hiring, managing, and paying a workforce takes an enormous amount of time and energy.

But that's not the model we have here.

That's the practical response. But there's also an unfortunate and more cynical response, which is the issue of answering to the people who give money with expectations of how it will be used. IMO, I think it would be very risky for a recipient to accept donations from anyone not personally known to them, for a project as opposed to personal need - the risk being unexpected behavior from someone who feels that their personal expectations have not been met. It only takes one.

Bottom line: at some point, the realistic question is: "what is the best use of my limited and valuable time?"

Looks like a bit more than two cents... as per usual :rolleyes:
 
Last edited:
JanAtheCPA said:
Hey @Ellen, I'm going to offer my two cents here, although Forest may have different thoughts which he'll share when he has time. I don't mean to call you out, because I've had quite a few private messages in the last year, with the same or very similar suggestion. My response is more comprehensive than I know you need to know, because it's really aimed at everyone reading this who might have the same thought, which I'm sure encompasses many more of our community members.

As a CPA, I definitely have strong opinions about this. Surprisingly, it's easiest to start with the question of whether GoFundMe funds are taxable. If the answer is Yes, then you've immediately got a whole range of complications and compliance to worry about. And then you're back to the #1 issue which is at the heart of this project (and has been all along) which is TIME. Money can buy time, but it takes a LOT of time just to get to the point where the benefits finally exceed the costs.

To start with: "donations" to a GFM campaign are never tax-deductible to the donor/giver. NEVER. This is because a GFM is not a qualified tax-exempt charitable entity. Qualifed tax-exempt charities have a TON of compliance requirements they have to regularly meet on local and federal levels. It's not easy to keep up, and many small charities are unable to do so. We've been there, tried that.

GFM funds are not taxable to the recipient ONLY IF the funds are strictly for personal needs like disaster losses or medical costs. Even more importantly, there must be absolutely no strings attached. The funds are truly a personal gift with no expectations on how they are to be spent. There is no accountability required.

If the GFM funds are for any kind of business or creative venture (such as tmswiki.org), especially any venture in which donors expect to receive any kind of benefits at all, then the funds are 100% taxable to the recipient (unless it's a fully-qualified tax-exempt entity and again - been there, tried that, no one has the time).

And, to repeat myself, once you're receiving taxable income rather than gifts, you're looking at a whole lot of valuable time which has to be wasted on compliance. You've got business licenses and state/local taxes, federal income AND self-employment taxes, AND all of the bookkeeping required to keep track of income and expenses in order to minize all of those taxes. If you hire people to help, you've got additional reporting requirements, even for independent contractors.

I'm one of those people who was paid to spend my time on just one limited area of compliance so my clients didn't have to. Paying taxes is a loss of funds. Paying accountants and consultants is a loss of funds. Then those funds have to be made up with even more fundraising. Pretty soon you need to hire a fundraiser. Every individual you hire takes time find and hire them - never mind replacing them when they inevitably move on or can't do the job.

And this is how an economy grows - which is fine if your goal is to grow an enterprise and create jobs and enhance the economy at large. The trade-off for investing time and funds in the economic growth model is accepting the reality that searching for, vetting, hiring, managing, and paying a workforce takes an enormous amount of time and energy.

But that's not the model we have here.

That's the practical response. But there's also an unfortunate and more cynical response, which is the issue of answering to the people who give money with expectations of how it will be used. IMO, I think it would be very risky for a recipient to accept donations from anyone not personally known to them, for a project as opposed to personal need - the risk being unexpected behavior from someone who feels that their personal expectations have not been met. It only takes one.

Bottom line: at some point, the realistic question is: "what is the best use of my limited and valuable time?"

Looks like a bit more than two cents... as per usual :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
As always, I appreciate your expertise and the generous contribution of your time.
 
Okey dokey, my friends. I'm going to start by posting this invitation here, on the assumption that the community members who are the most interested and invested in the upgrade of the forum are already following this thread.

Exciting News: we're looking for folks who are willing to log into the test server and start playing around with the software upgrade!

The upgrade was created with a forum backup from last July, and it is fully-operational in literally all ways. However, because our forum has a lot of custom add-ons, some of which are quite old, perhaps now obsolete, we want people to dink around and try out all of the various features, new and old, so that we can come up with a list of anomalies or things that seem to be missing (I've already found a couple).

Note that anyone who registered an account after July 2025 will not have an account, and thus no content, on the test site. This is kind of too bad, but not at all fatal to the goal of testing. The registration process should be exactly the same, including the email notification (and I tested it myself with a new account). I would simply request that people use their current account name so we know who we're interacting with (or something SO similar that it's obvious - eg, I might use JanA_test ).

We'd like to create a small temporary community for this project. It probably won't be for long, so this is something to jump on this weekend if you're interested.

Here's the thing: doing this requires adding a line to a small text-based command file on a PC (Windows, Mac or Linux). The very short line of text tells the internet traffic protocol on your computer (applied to all browsers) that the location of tmswiki.org is at a different IP address than where we are right now. That's it.

Practically speaking, what this means for you is that this PC can no longer access the live forum until you reverse that change. You can still access the real forum on any other computer or device.
- Users with accounts before July will simply log in as usual.
- "New" users will receive a sign-up email which must be received on your test machine so that the link properly sends you to the test site to log in.

I first tried it out on my workstation PC, then reversed the edit and switched to my old laptop, so now I have a dedicated machine that can only reach the test site (my old laptop is on Linux, but that's a whole other story - I'm not even sure how I got it to work).

We have step-by-step instructions to accomplish this, and to reverse it. I personally wrote a comprehensive tutorial that is unique to Windows 11 computers. Mac users will have to rely on a third-party web site, which has three tutorials for Windows, Mac, and Linux - that's the site I started with. Linux users are probably on their own because there are just too many different versions out there, and the instructions will vary almost immediately (as I quickly discovered).

Are you interested? Just send me a DM* with your operating system, and I'll send you a link to the appropriate set of instructions on our Google Drive account. If you're as frustrated as I am by the constant slowdowns, we can exchange email addresses to communicate more efficiently about this project (I have a tmswiki.org email for this purpose).

I hope to receive many enthusiastic responses, y'all!

*(of course, that's "Start a Private Conversation with me" on the old software - which in the upgrade is thankfully now referred to as Direct Messaging!)
 
Thank you so much for your kind words, @Diana-M and @Rusty Red. And thank you to everyone else for your support!

Thank you, also, Jan, for giving people a chance to see the new server! it's always good to have members of the team involved. Checking out the new server in advance will be a good way to help speed up the transition.

If you like tech, you can read the following brief progress report, otherwise skip it!
I've been hard at work on the migration of the Wiki side of this site (the part that isn't a forum). For the core software, the current plan is to do a series of six upgrades, representing major changes that the programmers have made to the structure of MediaWiki's MySQL database. I'm investigating whether it will be feasible to disable the Wiki addons (the wiki side has addons, too) and reenable them later. I've also been working on setting up a longer term security strategy involving SSH keys and a documentation strategy for administrative data.​
 
Thanks @Forest for all of your detailed work on this! It's clear now just how much is involved here. To that end, the 3 missing pieces seem a bit extraneous--seems to me that those are 3 of the items that we could drop. I could think of others that are so much more important that will be included.

I suggest that we think about how to handle the loss of bookmarks. Maybe we make an announcement before the upgraded site goes live? It could be that users might want to save some of those nuggets of wisdom (or reminders or touchstones) contained in one or two (or more) of those threads they held onto--stuff that has helped them get thru their TMS.

This site/community is healthy and is helping a lot of people. I want others to have the shot I had at the community, learning, and support, that came with me finding this website (hard to even call it that b/c it's so so much more!). It means a lot that that will be available.
 
Thank you so much, @Forest ! It is the labor of love and generosity, indeed! I am testing the new site and am very impressed with all the new features.
 
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