Scheduled Downtime

I second that

contango said:

To be honest I'd be inclined to tell users to deal with their post count changing. If they are only here for the post count rather than the fellowship/discussion maybe they need to reassess why they are posting at all. Having my post count drop would loosely equate to finding out that the church secretary no longer had a record of my attendance at services during 2009.

Ah yes, the eternal problem of identity columns and autoincrements. It seems like the kind of thing that could be done but maybe isn't as simple as it first appears.

If threads point to other threads and those other threads disappear it's no big deal, just put a custom 404 error page up so that people know the thread isn't there any more. It could even mention the fact that older threads get archived as a matter of routine.

Rep comments going nowhere - is that really a problem? If someone gave you a rep 18 months ago and you can't find the post any more does it really matter? Even now I've got a rep comment from a couple of weeks back where the post listed is "N/A", presumably because the thread starter turned out to be a troll and the thread was deleted.

So I guess the summary of all that is that you're right, but maybe the answer is to accept that ancient stuff is gone rather than worrying that every single post ever made must be preserved forever. Maybe for good measure it will cut the disk space and processing requirements, resulting in reduced operating costs for the board.

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In an ideal world, you'd be able to do that. However, for some users, it's almost a right of passage, as if having more posts means that you've got more authority on a site, etc, etc. Yeah, sure - but if your posts are just numbers, then there's a lot that can change. I mean, look at my post count. Yep, I'll admit - a metric crap ton of them are counting threads, but hey - I was young(er) and foolish, and made all sorts of trouble (just ask some of the staff members from my day ). Would I care about losing them? Not really. My name on this site is enough.

And yeah - the importing of threads into vB is kind of a once only thing. I've seen it done, but it sure as heck wasn't a legit way of doing it. You could theoretically archive the threads on the current version of vB (heck, I can't even remember if there's a function for that in 3.7...), and then neglect to import when you changed sites... I can't think what would happen then. Perhaps it'd just be the same as skipping them in the import. That being said, you could (even if you didn't delete old threads) strip out a huge amount of stuff that's not public. As I mentioned before, there's aeons of threads hiding in archival that no-one except senior staff has access to - everything from forums that've gone through restructures, etc, etc. Nobody deletes anything here - case in point, hard deleting anything will get questions asked pretty darn fast. It's all archived. You could even drop out a lot of the repaholics forum and the blessings exchange forums - they've served their point, posts have been made, repped, and blessed. There's several million of them gone now, you could feasibly bring them down to 50 million posts just doing that - and that's not even mentioning the counting threads...

The mindset of having an archive is a nice thing, to be honest. It's nice to be able to look back, and find a post from when I joined the site. Is it a major though? Nope, probably not - not to me, not to you, at least. For others, it does document a bit of their walk with Christ, which I can see why they'd be iffy about losing it. That's understandable, and forgivable. I think if the path of deleting things was walked down, a selective deletion would be essential.

LittleLambofJesus said:

Part of the problem seems to be that CF wants to be all thing to all people from all walks of life.
I mainly come here to discuss the Bible and Theology [as most can see if they visit the General Theology board]. I sometimes venture to other CF discussions boards, but only rarely.

I want the blessings function back!

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It does, yeah. That's part of the reason that it has attracted so widely though - but the problem has been that the site has traditionally split everyone down to the last hair because Christians online are absolutely notorious for not being able to get on with someone else in another denomination, no matter how small that denominational change may actually be. The moderation hasn't helped, either - different sub forums have different standards, some are overly zealous whilst others are far more chilled out. It's a tough one to gauge, realistically. You'd need to cut back a lot of the subforums, make them much more generic, impose a unified front on moderation and move lots of things about - and then you'd have to deal with the moaning from end users as well.

DC Scott said:

I support the technical side of things on the site, but I only engage when server starts acting up, needs updates or Paul engages me on something specific. I will connect with Paul and see what is going on. While I don't want to impact any site philosophical decisions that have been made on what is available or not available, technically speaking, anything is possible given enough resources to make it possible. That's my philosophy.

So, hang in there, and I will see what can be done from my perspective, based on Paul's feedback.

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Man, it's good to see you still around. Your work is great, and you should feel great. Thanks for dropping by - it shows quite a bit that you're willing to make time in your day to check back. I should clarify that I don't mean any ill-wishes towards you in any of my posts - I've seen nothing but good come from your work, and as you say - technically speaking, anything is possible through the application of resources, be that server, code, or people. Hard part, I guess, is just getting those resources cleared.

Just for clarification everyone. I was able to bless a few members with blessings. Are we talking about the blessing feature that allowed you to buy like site supporter status and avatar armor for other members?


ETA: I am sure Pauler will stop by to post but we think its a coding issue that went under the radar. It was fixed and the system is working because I can bless you all and you can receive them but you all cant bless!!! Sorry for the delay we are working on it now.

arborvita said:

Just for clarification everyone. I was able to bless a few members with blessings. Are we talking about the blessing feature that allowed you to buy like site supporter status and avatar armor for other members?


ETA: I am sure Pauler will stop by to post but we think its a coding issue that went under the radar. It was fixed and the system is working because I can bless you all and you can receive them but you all cant bless!!! Sorry for the delay we are working on it now.

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It could be a permission error

do you use Vbcredits the Original team version? (vbcredits.com) or the versions made by both parties after the team split up?

So in total there are 3 versions

VbCredits 1(Pixilfx and DW version)
VbCredits 2(pixilfx on his own version)
VbCredits 2 (DW on his own version)

Okay, so I am trying to narrow down all the noise and excuse my ignorance as I am not familiar the custom settings that CF did or did not have in place.

I made some modifications to the primary Registered Users group. Not sure if that fixed anything or not for anyone.

But, my question is this...

a) In your Postbit, do you see "Blessings" of others and your own?
b) In others Postbit, do you see the ability to [Bless] someone?
c) If YES to (a) and (b), are you able to send blessings to others?
d) If YES for (c), then what functionality is NOT working and who is able to use that functionality and who can't (currently) so I can try and narrow down permission differences and perhaps whole functionality issues missing to everyone that used to be here. In that case, describe to me how it worked and what you did previously.

Thanks!

DC Scott said:

Okay, so I am trying to narrow down all the noise and excuse my ignorance as I am not familiar the custom settings that CF did or did not have in place.

I made some modifications to the primary Registered Users group. Not sure if that fixed anything or not for anyone.

But, my question is this...

a) In your Postbit, do you see "Blessings" of others and your own?
b) In others Postbit, do you see the ability to [Bless] someone?
c) If YES to (a) and (b), are you able to send blessings to others?
d) If YES for (c), then what functionality is NOT working and who is able to use that functionality and who can't (currently) so I can try and narrow down permission differences and perhaps whole functionality issues missing to everyone that used to be here. In that case, describe to me how it worked and what you did previously.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Originally Posted by arborvita

Just for clarification everyone. I was able to bless a few members with blessings. Are we talking about the blessing feature that allowed you to buy like site supporter status and avatar armor for other members?

​

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There used to be a little heart to click on for blessings but I do not see it.

How were you able to send me blessings yesterday?
[Btw, I got your PM about the blessing function, but my message box is too "stuffed" to be able to respond]

27th November 2012 DonationReceived arborvita

This is a test 1,000

Does not show function to bless others and interest in bank is still at zero for savings, I am not tech savvy so dont know but as far as I can see they are still not working.

Blessings are working! Whatever you did seems to have worked.

it disappeared again!

icarusforde said:

Man, it's good to see you still around. Your work is great, and you should feel great. Thanks for dropping by - it shows quite a bit that you're willing to make time in your day to check back. I should clarify that I don't mean any ill-wishes towards you in any of my posts - I've seen nothing but good come from your work, and as you say - technically speaking, anything is possible through the application of resources, be that server, code, or people. Hard part, I guess, is just getting those resources cleared.

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No harm taken. Actually, I have a whole assortment of goodies I can unleash on CF that would improve speed and performance of the site. I will talk with Paul about it.

The blessing function is back

psalms 91 said:

it disappeared again!

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Your probably getting an issue with caching. Let me clear that out on my end, but you may have to clear cache on your end as well.

now its gone again

DC Scott said:

Your probably getting an issue with caching. Let me clear that out on my end, but you may have to clear cache on your end as well.

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I will try that also...haven't done it in awhile...stay tuned

.

Originally Posted by DC Scott

Your probably getting an issue with caching. Let me clear that out on my end, but you may have to clear cache on your end as well.

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YES!

Cache is cleared on this end.

LittleLambofJesus said:

There used to be a little heart to click on for blessings but I do not see it.

How were you able to send me blessings yesterday?
[Btw, I got your PM about the blessing function, but my message box is too "stuffed" to be able to respond]

27th November 2012 DonationReceived arborvita

This is a test 1,000

Click to expand...

Are you talking about this?

Yes! Thank you, is there a possibility of an arcade again as well? I hope. Bank still is not giving interest.

Now I can create blessings threads once again! Thank you Admins!

Bank should start giving interest now, but won't apply to any previous time, but should start working moving forward.

The arcade scripts were filled with so many security holes and it created a lot of pain. Every client of mine got rid of it and CF was the only hold out until it finally got the axe. I can look into it again, but I'm hesitant to recommend it, plus beyond security, it just wasn't written well for busy sites like CF without some TLC into optimizing the code which I doubt Paul wants to finance. lol.