Forum maintenance

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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Forum maintenance

Post: # 10744Post ptex »

Dear forum user,

Our forum is scheduled for a major maintenance task today, 6th of August 2008 at 02:00 am GMT.

Although the downtime should be something between 15 to 30 minutes, it's possible that the forum will remain out for up to 4 hours in a row given the tests that need to be done after.

During that period of time, all accesses to the forum will be redirected to a temporary page with a maintenance message.

This is a critical maintenance task and cannot be further delayed. Apologies for such a short notice warning.
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Re: Forum maintenance

Post: # 10745Post ptex »

Dear forum member,

After a somewhat troubled technical intervention going way beyond of what we previously anticipated, I'm happy that the preliminary tests have been successful and thus I'm reopening the forum.

Please report anything unusual you may see.

As always, I'm very much interested in hearing your opinion on how to improve your forum experience.

Take care and enjoy the forum :)
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Re: Forum maintenance

Post: # 10782Post ptex »

Hi,

During these last few days there have been a number of non-scheduled maintenance interventions and you may have seen occasionally the forum down message. Apologies for this, I didn't have a way to plan this in advance this time, anyway I made an effort to inform (in the redirection page) the approximate time the forum would be up again during the time while the intervention was happening.

Today these interventions have been concluded with success.

Anyway if you notice something strange about the forum please let me know asap.

All the best for you all and enjoy the forum!
The best portion of a good man's life is his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.
~William Wordsworth
TempUser
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Joined: Wed May 16, 2007 5:45 am

Re: Forum maintenance

Post: # 10785Post TempUser »

Hi.

I was actually just wondering...
When will we be able to customize the appearances of the forum to suit our own personal needs?
Say we wanted to match the colors of the forum with our Aura, or our favorite colors(for those such as me who don't know the colors of our aura)....not that I don't like the appearance as it is....but it could use a bit of variety or something.
I think this sounds cool....
Is this possible?
It doesn't matter how many books you have read, how many lectures you have heard - What matters is what you actually UNDERSTAND from them today about the universe and your particular role in it" -Thomas J. Chalko
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

Re: Forum maintenance

Post: # 10786Post ptex »

Hi AaronNZM,
Thanks for your message, yes it's possible and I tested it thoroughly but there are several reasons behind not activating this possibility in our forum.
The first is for security reasons! There are some templates out there which open up security holes that we don't want to see here ;-)
Second it's because this is not a standard forum, meaning there are a few modifications we implemented that would have to be replicated for each installed template and this would make every maintenance task a true nightmare.
I know these decisions can be very much subject to personal opinion but I chose to keep the forum a safer place and to implement features which can more useful content wise to the users here.
If you have a suggestion of what to implement in order to make the forum better I'd love to hear it :)
And sorry for not offering this possibility! I confess that the idea to match the Aura of each member with the forum colors is a very nice one though presently simply not feasible.
The best portion of a good man's life is his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.
~William Wordsworth
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ptex
Posts: 564
Joined: Tue Sep 06, 2005 11:00 am
Location: Europe, Planet Earth

new features

Post: # 10968Post ptex »

Dear friends,

In an effort to continuously improve your forum experience, we installed 2 new features in the forum:
  • 1) a quick reply (you'll be able to quickly reply a topic by scrolling down the page - see image 1 below)
    2) a duplicate subject check when starting a new topic (when starting a new topic and as you write its subject the software automatically checks for other topics and suggests / shows existing topics to reply instead of creating a new one - see image 2 below for a preview)
Forum downtime has been very short during the installation. As usual I ask you to please report any difficulty or comment you may have.

Thanks!

Image
    • Image 1- screen of the "quick reply" feature
Image
    • Image 2 - preview screen of the "duplicate subject check"
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