Thank you for your patience

Thank you for your patience while we upgrade our server. In case the forum listing disappears again, I'll try to replace it with links here:

• General Discussion Subforum
• Support Subforum
  
• Pain Recovery Program
  
• [etc...]

Hi everyone,

I hope you are finding the site helpful and supportive. Thank you for your patience with the recent server outages.

Our software is quite old, and because of the current problems, we may have to upgrade it on a more accelerated schedule than we had hoped for. I'm a teacher and am currently teaching intensive summer courses while trying to help my wife support her mother who was recently diagnosed with dementia. It's definitely not the time I would have chosen to upgrade a computer and a collection of websites as complex as ours!

Nonetheless, I remain very committed to the site and keeping it going for the rest of my life (and hopefully longer!). The community here is amazingly helpful, wise, and supportive, and my role at this point is primarily to keep the website going.

I'm having our web host build a new server, and they'll be helping me migrate our various software packages over to the new platform. I don't know if it will be successful, as the software stack we use has many layers, but I will do my best. I'll try to keep everyone updated in this thread.

The most important thing to note is that this transition, if successful, may necessitate an upgrade to newer versions of some of our core software products. The new versions will be better in every way, but it may take some time to track down (or program) extensions to replicate all the functionality you are currently accustomed to. The differences won't be huge, but it may be the price of keeping the site going.

Thanks, as always, to @JanAtheCPA and the other amazing members - like yourself - who keep this site such a special place.

Forest

 

Thanks for the explanation, @Forest!

I expect that others (if not everyone) was experiencing that the forum and wiki were both still really slow all day yesterday, although it was better than Wednesday. Forest was also able to restore the wiki home page which had disappeared. What I didn't notice is that forum notifications weren't being sent! I expect you all had the same thing happen: at about 7pm PDT last night, I started receiving delayed notification emails from the last 24 hours or so. And the lag disappeared at the same time, whew!

Fingers crossed for now, folks!

 

I'm so glad to hear that, @Diana-M ! Your words mean more than you can know. I remember what that was like, and having such positive people here makes it all worth it.

So far, I've been battling with the software. I have a preliminary plan on how to upgrade our two major software programs, Xenforo (for the forum) and MediaWiki (for the wiki pages). What makes it challenging is that the programming language both products use was upgraded in the intervening time, so you can't have the old software and the new software running on the same computer (it's complicated). Nonetheless, I have a plan, and I'm waiting on the migration team to copy some data onto the new server.

 

Yes, Bruce. It's very frustrating to be unable to enter the forum home page from the wiki or from any of my browser bookmarks. I'm still not sure it's accessible at all - I think I've only been able to reach the main list page of subforums by kind of working backwards to reach them - but at least a new thread can be started once you've navigated to a subforum.

I've been dinking around and trying things in order to figure out a consistent method for getting to my usual starting point, which is the "All recent threads" page. It doesn't help that the experience is different on two different android browsers. It helps to have an email notification to go back to, or you can go to your personal profile page and click on one of your posts or bookmarks or profile updates.

However, I have a feeling that new members without any content might have a difficult time navigating the forum without prior links to go to.

 

And I've received another help offer from a well-known and tech-savvy member. The big migration in 2012, from the original platform, was a logistically challenging project and a team effort. Rinkey, I think you missed out on that because you were busy physically creating the original Thank You Dr Sarno tribute/gift book at the time!

 

Some special software has been installed to allow me to something I'll call, for simplicity "the PHP version dance".

Tech support has kicked off the initial data transfer to the new computer.

Hopefully, we'll have a new server relatively soon that people can test out. It will be very bare bones, but it will be reliable. (Reliability is crucial, because outages like this would kill our community over time.)

Basically, we're upgrading from version 1.5.24 of our forum software to version 2.3.7. That represents 8 years of programming effort from a team of very talented programmers. When it's all in place, it will be a big improvement. It will just take some time to move everything over.

 

Whew, they are, indeed! Nice work, @Forest! Holding the course for the next phase.

 

Thank you, @Rinkey, @NewBeginning, @JanAtheCPA, @Mala, @Cactusflower!

I'll have to keep this short as I try to squeeze in time to update the site.

I'm working on building a second copy of the computer that runs this website (aka the "server" or "VPS"). The current computer that the website runs on is getting increasingly unstable, so we're going to have to do the transfer more quickly than I would like, without time to thoroughly test everything or to find, install, and integrate software that replicates all of the current functionality on the site. The biggest software I'm having difficulty replicating is the bookmarks functionality. I'm focusing on that right now.

 

Yes! Every single piece of software, including the DNS, on our entire server will have to be upgraded. This will make all of our software more reliable and will help ensure our community's continuation and health well into the future.

I've found a pair of consultants to help with the tougher parts of the forum migration. Specifically, we may have to write a little custom program to import people's bookmarks, the thread tags, and the keyword linker database into the new forum. Each of those functionalities were provided by addons that don't exist any more, so I'm having to find new addons to replace them. If I can't find programs to do it automatically, the consultants will help us write the programs that import the data.