Alrighty, so we have do know the cause of both the email situation and the forum crashing.
The crashing is due to backups. We are backing up the old old backups into a different server (which will take a few hours) and then deleting and producing a new back up. This will likely happen tonight, meaning we will probably have one more crash today around the same time.
As for the forum emails not working, we know what happened. Although, we are going to try to change them over tonight rather than fixing what we had. If this works, then it will lower the monthly cost of the forums by a large portion. If not, then we’ll just fix what we had.
There was a big update, and that update needed fixing, which is why forum was acting up for the past day or two for many/most of you.
However, it should be back to normal now.
In saying that, we have a couple of new things you may have seen…
The first posts of each thread has been simplified. You may notice that the info with number of posts, users, likes, etc, are all in one tidy line now. They are also showing at the bottom of each thread too.
To let you all in on the goings-on behind the scenes of the forums, Caliope and I are in the process of halving the cost of the forums and improving its performance.
Our plan is only to migrate the forums to an another server, away from Digital Ocean. This means only copying the WHOLE forums and moving it over, we are not planning to do anything with it. So from about February 18, 2025 5:00 AM→February 18, 2025 8:00 AM the forums will be down and unable to be accessed, however, nothing should be changed at all.
What this means for you?
The forums will be down for those three hours.
When the forums is back, nothing should have changed, although if ANYTHING is different then please let us know and we will look into as quickly as possible.
Thanks for your understanding and patience during this time
The forum migration didn’t quite go as planned last Tuesday, given that it didn’t happen at all. The fault was not in the technology, it was a human issue. In that, the tech-person who is helping us host the forum, fell ill to the point they weren’t able to human and perform even the simplest of tasks.
That being said, they’re better and we’re going to retry tomorrow at the same time.
It seems all images have disappeared, once again. Not sure if it’s something you guys expected as it makes sense with a server change, but thought I would mention it
Interesting that you mention this guys, and thank you sooo much for telling us here. Very much appreciated, especially being so prompt.
I immediately went to the photography thread to see if I had the same problem and I do. So I tried clearing my cookies and it didn’t work. So we’re looking into it now and hopefully it should be fixed soon. (fingers crossed)
The update is completed and we have copied the whole forum over to the new server host. But with this new update, please let us know over the next few days if you notice any changes to the forums or any issues that may arise.
Yes, the reason everyone had to re-login is ‘cause the forum moved to a new host server away from Digital Ocean. Although, it fully copied every part of the forum over, the technology still sees it as a new site-ish, thus everyone has to login.
So not sure if it’s enough to call an issue, but I’m no longer receiving notifications to my phone. Mt phone in general is weird and created a icon to DQ (like an app) and I would get notifications in my notification bar. Well I’m no longer receiving those notifications
Umm… not too sure about this one. Just curious, do you use your own app for this forum or are you using the Discourse app?
As I use the Discourse app when I’m on my phone and my notifications seem to be working.
I’m going to assume it’s my own app? It just appeared one day on my screen with the option of keeping the direct line to DQ or to constantly look it up each time. (I’m fairly lazy so I opted for the quickest way)
Is it like a Google Chrome app? Cause I have the same thing and even if I logged in Samsung browser I also separately had to log in again in the actual chrome browser, not sure if this helps but well thought I would share
