Some of you may have noticed that the forums (and clankiller.com in general) have been slow and/or throwing errors lately. I'm pretty sure it's my hosting provider that's the issue, but it doesn't help that the forum software is a TINY bit out of date.

As a result of this, as well as other reasons, I'm thinking of migrating elsewhere, as well as updating everything to the latest. That comes with a few caveats:
- Upgrading is probably going to kill all the file attachments we've got. So images and other stuff will just stop working. New posts you will (probably) be able to attach stuff again, but I'll have to experiment.
- To make this easier on me, I'll probably migrate this to a different domain. Instead of forums.clankiller.com it'll be forums.plasmasky.com. I can set up automatic redirects and stuff so if you go to the old domain it'll just forward you to the new one. Eventually I could migrate it back to forums.clankiller.com, but it would take some time.
- When I start doing the migration and upgrade, I'll have to start with a specific point-in-time backup of the database. Anything posted after that backup will be lost. I can take down the forums once I get to the point of starting that process, so we're guaranteed not to lose anything.

This brings a lot of benefits, not the least of which is way better performance and absolute and full control of everything. The upgrade is inevitable even if I decide not to migrate hosts, which means losing the file attachments may be unavoidable. I plan on playing around with this a bit to see what I can do.

With that said, anyone have any opinions or input?

Noooooooo losing all the old attachments?! :O

I think I can live with that As long as we're all still around to bug each other it doesn't matter how it looks Mind you if I have to save a new bookmark... yeesh. So much work

I'm not sure which quote Peltz was going for.... I suspect "Nobody puts ketchup on a hotdog" is probably the most on-topic.

I think there was a quote for every step of the process you have to go through. Including for events that go wrong or succeed

lol, very good. I have no doubt my inevitable yelling and screaming will have some appropriate Clint Eastwood quote to go along with it.

On a positive note, I figured out why my attachments on my test server weren't working. Something funky with the FTP client... I was able to switch it to binary mode and looks like it's good now. Next step is to try to upgrade it to the latest version locally. If that works, then I can try to get it running on my other domain. So yay... almost 10% done!

Do what you have to do man, I think we are all already happy that we still have this place to connect and say hi once in a while (and that you are making it possible)! Honestly, I'd be happy to donate a percentage of the annual cost to run things if you'd like that. Seems only fair after mooching off you for 10 years.

Just make sure you give us a heads up before changing things!

10 years? The first post of the forum was made March 30, 2003. So more like 20. It's fine though... I'll be migrating all this stuff over to an AWS account I have. It'll cost more, but I was going to use that account for other things anyway. No need to pitch in, though I appreciate it. I haven't had much chance to work on it, though... I've got the forums working in a local VM (as I mentioned) but I haven't gotten any further. Hopefully I'll be able to make some progress this weekend.

Alright, so here's an update.

Using my local VM, I was able to successfully upgrade the forums to the latest version. This is now an old copy (the DB is a little over a week old), but I have all the steps down, so dumping and upgrading a new version of the database should go pretty quick. There are a few caveats

The spoiler tag stopped working. Looks like it was a mod, which don't survive the upgrade process. I should be able to make it work again. To me this is such a minor issue it's not worth tackling yet.
We go back to the Subsilver theme again. I should be able to fix that, hopefully.

Next steps are to spin up another VM locally to approximate my AWS server, then move the fully upgraded forum into it and get it working. The only part that's a bid weird there is I plan on going from Apache to Nginx for the web server. Everything else should be super simple. Once I have that working, I'll need to configure my AWS server, import the forums and get those fully functional in AWS. Then I'll do one more DB dump from here, run through the upgrades to get it updated, restore it to AWS, and if everything works, modify this forum's code to redirect to the new location. Easy! Don't expect this to be completed in the near future.

All I read was bla bla bla .

Go back to the subsilver theme... that's all I was viewing it in anyway! At least I think so. Can't seem to spot the theme option anywhere

Hahaha I'm also on subsilver. Old habits die hard!

Great to hear the update went well! And yeah don't sweat all the small things like the spoiler tags...

20 years, oof. Make me a bit anxious. Like, one day one of us might die and the rest might never know what happened. Sort of what happened with the original walkthrough online forums where we all met (even if I'm sure the guy didn't die haha): the owner/admin disappeared one day and never came back.

That was a sweet domain name tho so maybe he just sold out.

Hey man, Clankiller.com is awesome! Why have I only received one "offer" where someone suggested I just give them the domain?

Were they begging or threatening you?

They were trying to convince me that it was abandoned and they would make good use of it. I was not impressed.

In forum news, I was able to get the forums working in a test machine locally, running on top of nginx and the latest mysql, ubuntu and php versions. This took quite a few hours of putzing around with nginx configs. However, with that done, I know everything is possible, so I've started to get the plasmasky production server ready to go for the forums. It's partially completed... I can only do this for so many hours on my days off before I need to do something else.

So anyway, the effort is well underway. I've got some time off coming up, so there's a good chance it'll be done within the next 8 days or so.