[solaris]

Hi guys,

Maybe it's just me but it seems that this forum is out of order more than it isn't, and has been for a long time now. Given that it's a commercial piece of software this seems, to put it mildly, a bit odd. Why so many problems?

I should add that the reason the forum being broken gets to me is because when I can access it, I've found it to be a very useful source of help and information .

[Kieran]

I couldn't agree more. I have spoken with Matt about this in the past making many of the same points you make here.

Reasons given in the past have been botched upgrades causing database errors which then caused the forum to lock everyone out till they were fixed.

I agree with you that this particular install of vBulletin is not performing to the usual high standard of vBulletin forums and will mention this to Matt again.

I'm sure he will also post up a reply here in due course.

[Matt]

Hi Guys (no girls on the thread I hope )

Our secure hosting platform (for XILO related sites, internal DBs, telephone platform and related stuff) is very different from our customer network.

We replicate the databases mainly for redundancy. However, for some reason the forum wasnt setup in this way correctly. So when we did our recent MySQL upgrade it broke a few things on the forum.

Anything that referenced the forum (such as the forum feed when you logged into my.xilo.net), worked fine - just the VB scripts directly.

Normally when VB has a problem - we get an email, however, as part of the DB *was* working - we didn't get any mails

Hopefully this should be the last of the problems with the forum - many apologies and I can confirm that this has no direct connection to any customer sites.

Hope this clears it up slightly

Thanks

Matt

[Andy]

Hmmmmm.

[Kieran]

<rant>
I have to say that I think the latest bout of downtime could have easily been avoided.

I accept what you were trying to do with the moving into my.xilo but you should always test something in a development environment before affecting the live version - we should have had the forum live while you worked on a copy and then when it all worked there should have been a tiny amount of downtime before moving over to the new system.

Also, before you bring the forum down, some notice would be nice, I mean unless its a critical security upgrade would it really hurt to post up an announcement a day or so in advance saying about the downtime and how long it is likely to last?

One of the reasons the use of this forum is not as high as it could be in my humble opinion is because of how much downtime there is. I've been running forums for years and while I'm not saying you don't know how to run a forum, the amount of avoidable downtime on here is just not how things are done.
</rant>

[Andy]

Well said Kieran - I would have said something similar but I couldn't be bothered to type more in case the forum went down half way through.

[gary64]

Oh oh, 'trouble at t' mill'!

Though I do have to say I agree with the above comments.

Gary.

[Matt]

I do take your comments on-board Kieran. However, it was tested locally prior to live service and during the switch over, tests were conducted to ensure it was working.

For some reason, that we still have not been able to track - certain customers were not able to see the forum and some were not able to post.

We're sorry about that and are looking at other avenues to integrate the forum.

Matt