Well folks, the new forum system was not ready for prime time, as they say. It worked fine with only a few folks on at any given time, but given the load of this morning, we found that it bound up the server's processes pretty durned quickly. That, and there a few other issues that didn't become apparent until we had users using it. So, we have shut it down and gone back to the "old" forum. For those that posted messages in the new forums, those are now gone, as there is no way for us to import those to this system.

Tom,As I and others have preached about the latest and greatest (OS, drivers, etc), they ain't necessarily all their cracked up to be!:-( Guess we'll muddle through with the forums the way they are now!! Still a great source!!H-3's forever!!!

Well, as a result of the fiasco this morning, we have made a decision to go forward with the purchase of a new machine sometime later this year. We don't know what the specs will be or when we'll do it, but it will be a Ferrari on steroids if I have anything to say about it. :) The one used for the FTP and forums is no slouch, but as the loads increase, we need mo' horsepower!

Oh well. Will the forums ever take on the new look? I for one liked it, too bad we had to revert.

Greg, you mean you want us to reduce the font size to miniscule???? :-lol

>Greg, you mean you want us to reduce the font size to >miniscule???? :-lol Actually, there was one feature[/] that I was really looking forward to!That is, the ability to post straight ASCII text when necessary to prevent the durn pseudo-HTML of the forum software from screwing up XML code......you have no idea the number of 'hoops' we have to jump through to share snippets of code in the Aircraft & Panel Design Forum! :(

Not necessarily that, but the interface was slick. Did the screenshot forum get wiped out? All the messages are gone.

On the conservative side "if it aint broken, dont fix it", on the progressive side "The odds are low but if I dont play I sure gonna lose" }>Anyway thank you, Tom, for reverting to the old one, I can put away my magnifying glass now :-lol.Dominique

Tom, don't give up! The switch to MySql would have really sped things up. Text based systems are lame (slow and error prone). Hopefully you will find a solution to the problems you've experienced.

Is the old forum system that slow anyway?I've been a regular browser on the AVSIM forums for a couple of years and I don't think that they are slow at all.I just glad that AVSIM exists in the first place and that its free. A great resource and fun too!Thanks.Matthew.

Well, they are behaving fairly nice tonight. They just tend to get slowed down whenever the file library is booming and during the peak times during the day. But lately they had been suffering other slowdowns that hopefully a combination of Matt's work on the ftp box and a few setting changes in the forums will help. We will see. But there still is probably a need for something better down the road as we continue to grow.

Scott,Besides the "minuscule" font, what were the other negative aspects about the new software. I'm asking because I was considering same software for a different enterprise. Thanks.Dave Vega

>Well, as a result of the fiasco this morning, we have made a >decision to go forward with the purchase of a new machine >sometime later this year. We don't know what the specs will >be or when we'll do it, but it will be a Ferrari on steroids[/font color] >if I have anything to say about it. :) The one used for the >FTP and forums is no slouch, but as the loads increase, we >need mo' horsepower! Tom, is that possible?The new "Enzo" has a 600+ horsepower engine.Look at it, it's just....mmmmmmfast by default. :DThanks for the good news though. Alex.

That just answered my question from the Help with Forums conference.Brent

Dave, the features of the forum for the most part are good. In the time we messed with it, just a few little bugs and some irritants we came across. Out of the box, the bad words filter worked too well and the bad email listing didn't work at all in preventing registrations with those email domains. Matt had the code changed to fix those fairly quick and the author of the program is aware of the bugs, so should be fixed by the next release. The other thing was you've probably noticed how if we place an anchored topic in a forum and it gets lots of replies, if we later lock that topic, it will collapse the thread if you are viewing threads as expanded and it helped cleaned up the look of the forum a little. The new forum wouldn't collapse the thread when you locked it. Not really a bug, just a different way of doing it.Basically, the new forum software had all the functions of this one, and made many of them better. Search function works much better with MySql compared to our current text forums. The bottom line is the performance hit we saw when we opened it to the public was just intolerable. It was running fine when we first started it up, and the minute we opened the flood gates, it buckled. But I don't think many people have a real good idea just how much the forums do get beaten and not just any forum software can hold up under the load. As long as the website you are going to be using it on isn't getting too many hits at once in the forums, it would likely run just fine for you. If you haven't already, check out the DCScripts website and you can go through the suport forums there. I think you can even get access to the admin demo before purchasing if you contact the author. There is also a listing of websites using the product so you can check out other websites that have more load than the DCScripts support site.If you have any other specific questions, feel free to email me and I'll try to answer them.