Upgrading the vBulletin software that runs this forum
 

The vBulletin used here is 3.6.7, 2 years old, and no longer supported by the vBulletin company. The pressure is on to "upgrade" (an abused word) to 3.8, but all the customising will need to be done from scratch again.

Gerald,

If you are going to "upgrade", is there any way for some of us to help you with the required customisation?

Gerald,

I would be happy to help you with customising, changing or adding if you decided to upgrade. You would probably have change my status back to what it was.

Let me know if you want some help.

I am also available to help on the customizations if needed :)

Upgrade, you mean the software or their bank accounts, oh yeah probably both. :)

The bank account side isn't a problem - the donations to the forum will cover it.

Thanks for the offers of help! The biggest help that I would need is some patience with things at first looking different than before. It will take a while to get the the familiar logo & pics at the top, the right shade of blue and a couple of other things that I have forgotten that I have done. For example, I removed all indicators that show whether a member is online or not. Disabled signature lines and avatars. Etc.

So I would need people to tell me what is missing, and what needs to be fixed, and then to be patient. . . . . :)

Create a thread called: help me retune vbulletin and we can consolidate the help in a single thread.

Make backups! :)

Good luck!

Gerald,

We will be happy to help you in any way that you feel will help.

I think you out to get rid of quotes also.

Pablo, I have never made a backup. I am serious! :eek:

(Our ISP does daily backups, and sometimes I had to ask him to take me back to a point where everything was working correctly. Maybe loose a couple of posts, but he has always had the backup)

Gerald

As long as your ISP is making a daily backup you should be fine.

Gerald, may I gently suggest that you arrange to copy one of your ISP's backups, or a dump of the forums somewhere else, say once a year, or once a quarter?

It's a hedge against a natural, political, financial, or hackical disaster befalling your ISP.

Rare and unlikely, yes. Consequences? Potentially extreme. To my mind, loosing a year's worth would be painful, but ultimately recoverable.

Maybe someday I'll tell y'all a story about concrete saws, remodeling the floor of the office suite next door to our data center, and a $70m/yr company knocked offline for 24 hours ...

I guess you don't need tales of hard drives/isp/datacenter failures right?

Im not versed in vbulletin, but I guess there should be a way to backup the whole bulletin, quick googling the subject returned this thread: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=39558

Your main worry should be what would happen if they have a catastrophic problem, do they backup offsite?

If I were you, I would sleep better if I had a snapshot of the bulletin once a week or once a month at least.

Good Luck!

Hi Brad, I am not that attached to this forum! :eek:

Just kidding! My ISP guys do have regular offsite backups and servers at different centers across the USA. That's why they are of the most expense around, but I sleep very easily. :)

I have placed the order, and paid, for an upgrade within the next 24 hours. I am hanging on for the ride! :D

This written by our ISP: Attachment 5325

Looks like we're on 3.8.3 now and all seems well?

That backup.pdf document addresses my point in Section 7, page 13. :)

Just out of curiosity : what is the current size of the forum.

so can we have video embedded in the post now???

Thanks for everything G' -

Gerald,

I want to thank you the expense you put into the MechMate Forum. Not many people have a forum with out lots of advertising to help pay for it. Plus all the thought you have put into making the forum clutter free.

Thank you.

Amen Nils. Gerald's selflessness still amazes me.

Gee, I left this entirely in the hands of the vBulletin guys and Jake Bunce did the conversion. I have not changed a single setting since, yet almost every single thing works just as before. Wonderful!

(Already I see a "Tags" block just above this quick reply box that is wasting space and adding to scrolling distance - it will have to go unless it has a definite benefit . . )

Brad, are you volunteering to do those MySql dumps for me? :)

Irfan, the linked video may come one day. But I must admit that I find the typical CNC builder's video to be of poor quality and very boring :o

G' are you talking about JR's videos :D

Are you calling JR a "typical CNC builder" ?

Don't answer that!

Again, because some of us (me in particular) have very expensive and slow internet access, we cannot waste our precious quota on viewing videos. Generally I cannot take part in a discussion based on a video content, because I don't bother to view most videos.

(Our broadband speeds are also poor, which means that all youtubes have big delays in them)

Gerald,

A round of "Yip, Yip, Horray for Jake and the VBulletin guys. They did a great job on the conversion.

That was the easiest conversion I ever worked on!

What is the tag box used for?

Does anyone use the Quick Reply box? That takes up a lot of space. I always just hit post replay.


Gerald,

The photos in 4:1 Transmission thread are not appearing when I view the thread... might be a size issue but I thought you might like to know about it.

I wish you could add the "New Posts" button at the bottom of the thread so I could go directly to the next new post.

I like the albums function in the user control pannel

Nils,

It was also the easiest upgrade for me - ever! Okay, I did have to pay them $210 and give them access to absolutely everything, but the result speaks for itself. These vBulletin guys are totally professional.

Strange that those pics are not visible to you. Anyone else with pic viewing problems? (Make sure that you are logged in first - maybe you got logged out during the upgrade).

A "New Posts" button at the bottom makes a heck of a lot of sense! Could you perhaps check http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/index.php and http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/ to see if anyone else has implemented that?

Ros, can you tell us what the albums function will do?

I'm still seeing a problem when editing an reply.

When click on manage attachments, are not our previously added files, only see option to add new.

I think this is a future revision in the vbulleting reply thread attachements manage.

Yes Gerald.

In the User Control pannel see in the left in Networking, the Pictures & Albums

We can add our photo albums.

Who can view those albums? Where?

http://www.mechmate.com/forums/album.php?u=5321

I like the idea to add albums from the constructors, but the isp space and the data transfer ammount increases.