Site changes | Page 32 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Hello all. This is a heads-up that I’ll be moving the site to a new host and server in the coming days.

My old hosts, WiredTree, were acquired by another company sometime last summer. I’d noticed the tech support had worsened in recent weeks and my sites had experienced server downtime, which was unusual for WiredTree (who had always been excellent), but it looks as though the decline coincided with the Liquid Web takeover. So I’m jumping ship.

I’ve just paid for another server with KnownHost (for those interested in these things), and I’ll ask them to migrate everything from the WT/LW server to the new one. KnownHost have a really good reputation for speed, uptime and support, actually offer better spec for less money, and apparently have no intention of being acquired.

I’ll be able to test the migrated site before I switch the domain name to the new IP address. In the past when moving hosts I’ve closed the forum on the old server, then left it open on the new one, so no posts would be lost. It seemed to work OK last time but please don’t shout at me if things go wrong. It might even fix a few anomalies, so fingers crossed for the PM system (no promises at this stage).

I don’t know when the move will happen, but I’ll do my best to keep you updated. If things move quickly I might not be able to give too much warning. If I can I’ll ask for it to happen during UK daytime hours, when most forum visitors are asleep, but that depends on who’s available to help me at KH.

I don’t know. I think about it Now And Then , but it’d cause many headaches. I’d like to move to forum software with a wider developer base (ie lots of people contributing additional features), but every one of them seems flawed in some way and to be frank I don’t fancy spending ages dealing with the fallout. So for now I’ll probably keep things as they are.

Yes, I got it. Thanks for testing those.

If I’m feeling brave I might try restoring the subscription and watches. Sometimes it’s server configuration that makes things stop working, rather than the forum software, but it’s often difficult to work out precisely where the fault lies. Maybe I’ll restore them tomorrow. Bed now though.

As an experiment, I’ve reintroduced Watches. This used to be a forum feature but I had to drop it after some people reported seeing other people’s alerts.

To watch a topic, look for this button (next to the RSS icon on desktop, not looked on mobile yet):

Here’s the official description of the Watches plugin:

Not to be confused with Subscriptions, think of setting a ‘Watch’ as more like creating a Bookmark.

Watches works as more of an in forum notification system, instead of sending Emails. Logged in users will have the ability to keep up with interesting topics via the conveniently added ‘Watch’ button attached to the bottom of topics, and underneath the reply editor. Also added will be a new ‘Watches’ button in the header of the forum for users to review and unwatch, although this can also be done on an individual level from within a watched topic itself.

So the notifications work similarly to @mentions.

Here’s where you review your watch list, next to the Inbox on desktop:

This component was active a couple of years ago, so you might still have old watches that you’d forgotten about (it’s remembered my old ones). As I mentioned before, we had a problem with people’s watches showing up on others’ accounts, so if you see something that shouldn’t be there please edit the list in the first instance to remove anything you don’t want to follow. If strange things get added after that I’ll have to abandon it.

If you think you’re getting someone else’s watch notifications, let me know here (or in the weird things thread) and I’ll shut it down again. Consider this a test for now. 

For the record, these are the watches I have active on my account. If you see the same then we have a problem.

There’s another forum plugin called Subscriptions which we used to have, but I disabled that too. I’ll try that later if all else seems OK.

I’m creating accounts for John, Paul, George and Ringo, so their birthdays appear in the list. I did this before but they got removed after one year, because the accounts had never posted anything. So you’ll see four test posts below. Please don’t get too excited!