Site Maintenance Scheduled for 4/14/21

[nezzer]

The site will be offline starting at 7 PM mountain time on Wednesday 4/14/2021. We will be performning some database maintenance including using a new storage system recommended by vBulletin, moving images out of the database, and tweaking logging settings. The end result is that the database should shrink and no longer sporadically go offline causing a site outage.

The forum will be unreachable during this time and you will likely get an error page back if trying to visit the website. The downtime is completely dependant on how long the database operations take to complete. It could be an hour, or it could be a day. Thanks for your patience.

[nezzer]

The site maintenance is complete. The database structure has been updated, search index rebuilt, attachments (images) moved out of the database and to the filesystem, and the database logging has been tweaked. Our disk usage has been reduced and so has the size of the database. We should no longer have any issues with the database closing rendering the site unusable.

Let me know if you find something that doesn't work.

On a side note, it turns out vBulletin includes a nice feature where the site can be disabled for everyone but admins. The site still runs and users can still visit the site, but rather than display any forum posts it simply displays a message of my choosing. Now that I know how easy it is to temporarily bring down a site but still allow me to test changes, I may perform upgrades more regularly.

[Ranger_xs1100]

Great work Nezzer! Thanks for all that you do!

[MarkD]

Much appreciated, Nezzer!

[cajun31]

I tried to login during the maintenance and go a nice message telling me what was going on. Appreciate all you do.