Changes coming to energetic forum

[Aaron]

I've been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes upgrades on the server. Some are standard updates/upgrades and some are extra precautions taken to resist the ongoing hack attacks, which is happening more frequently.

Soon, we'll be closing energeticforum.com temporarily to do some upgrades and updates to the forum software itself. We are probably going to upgrade it to vbulletin 4.0 just like energyscienceforum.com and quite possibly, we might just upgrade it to vbulletin 5.0.

After that, hopefully, it will be set for another 10-15 years

IF YOU HAVE BEEN EXPERIENCING ANY PROBLEMS USING THIS FORUM, PLEASE POST YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE.

Rather than posting that you cannot post, etc., elaborate on the issue. Please post screenshots if possible or an exact sequence of events of what happens. Thanks!

[spacecase0]

if it matters any,
vbulletin 4.2 worked very well when I ran it
vbulletin 5.0 gave me no end of compatibility issues with users. but I suppose that was a few years ago and likely many of the bugs have been worked out by now.

[Aaron]

vbulletin

if it matters any,
vbulletin 4.2 worked very well when I ran it
vbulletin 5.0 gave me no end of compatibility issues with users. but I suppose that was a few years ago and likely many of the bugs have been worked out by now.

I appreciate the feedback.

Energy Science Forum is 4.2.x and works pretty good, but needs some updating.

When 5.0 came out, I heard bad things, but like you mention, It's been years so I think it should be smooth. As long as the overall feel of the forum structure can stay the same with 5, I'll probably go that route.

[spacecase0]

don't know how you are hosted (and not sure I want to know)
but if you can set up a test server, (if you have payed for all of it anyway)
make a copy of the current mysql under a new name and run the new versions somewhere, (maybe energeticforum.com/test1)
and run version 4, and another copy for version 5 as test2... or something like that
most hosting services will let you run many at the same time, especially if the external data is not going to go up.
even set up an offline server will show you how things work.
either way, testing is your friend here
edit,
but whatever you do for testing,
make sure to block public access to that file with the mysql password before you change that file with that info. (but you likely already know all of that)

[Aaron]

clone

Yes, the admin cp lets me shut down the forum for maintenance.

I have an old mirrored energeticforum on a subdomain, I need to delete that all out and reclone this on there to test stuff out.

once it is worked out, i can open it up public for some test drives to get some feedback.