Site Upgrade Scheduled for 8/22 / Site Ownership Change / Gossip

[MaximPhil]

I'll just say Thank You Nezzer. Being able to welcome new members will energize this forum once again.

Phil

[johnstewart]

Nezzer - just saw this thread today. I am a long-time, but infrequent, poster here (I'll admit it, it's when something's wrong with my bike!).

I was terrified when I couldn't log into my account to make a post yesterday. It would be a great loss if we lost XS11.com.

Anyway, I'm a long-time IT infrastructure nerd. If there's anything I can do in that area, I'm more than willing.

Thank you for your work!

[natemoen]

Very great news! So happy to hear this!

[Rasputin]

I am absolutely overjoyed that this site has a second or third wind. It is so important to XS owners all over the world. I , myself could never do such an undertaking and I admire a person who can. This is AWESOME news!

[MaximPhil]

If Nezzer is on schedule we will soon know if XS11 has entered a new chapter.

Will it all hold together as we blast off together ?
Hoping for the best. See you all on the other side

Phil

[Bonz]

I'll make my last post on XS11.com a toast to Nezzer!

[nezzer]

Just a reminder to all that in 3 hours I will backup the current forum database and start the process of setting up the new site. You can keep using xs11.com but any post made after 10 AM mountain time will not be transferred over to the new site.

I expect it to be a few days before the site goes live.

[nezzer]

The upgrade is complete. I am sure there will be more changes to be made, but the site is working. Here are some highlights:

1. New users can register
2. Emails should be working, including new user email address verification emails.
3. All site traffic is encrypted
4. We are running the absolute latest vBulletin software on Ubuntu 20.04, meaning we shouldn't need to make any more major changes for years.
5. Image upload works (more on that later)
6. Different site styles (look and feels) are available. Try the menu in the lower left corner

There are some catches however. For starters, while image upload in vBulletin works, you can only add a single image to a post. The configuration for image management is surprisingly complex. After a couple hours, I gave up on trying to increase that limit from 1 to 5 images. I will get back to that later. Also, even though I can confirm emails going out, I don't trust the contents. I hope the server is not trying to catch up on years of old email. Let me know if you are getting junk email.

Another gotcha, I have removed everyone but TopCat and myself from the Administrators group and I eliminated all super moderators. I did not delete any user accounts but I wanted to start with a known set of people with access to the admin stuff, then we can add more people back into those groups as we go.

I do not want to be a single point of failure. I plan to look for a long-time member to volunteer as a co-admin. This person would have access to do everything in vBulletin, on the server, and the server host (vultr.com).

After spending hours going through vBulletin settings, I am confident we are only using bout 1% of its available features. It is truly overwhelming. If you know of a feature we should be using, please let me know and I will see if we can enable it.

Final note, the $6/mo virtual machine wasn't cutting it. Our database is too large for doing taxing things like rebuilding our search index after the upgrade. I upgraded it to the $12/mo server which has double the RAM (2 GB), double the storage (64 GB NVMe), and double the monthly bandwidth (2 TB). Should help the site stay responsive.

[JeffH]

Well here we are. Flying along on v5.6.2
WoW, this is fantastic.

Yep, the 1 - 1 - 1 plan seemed a bit skimpy. 1 - 2 - 2 has us up and rolling.

Thanks Neezer for making this happen. We XSives sure appreciate you tackling this monster upgrade.
Haven't looked for a Donation bucket but when it is time to add some $$ let us know.

Jeff

[madmax-im]

Awesome..All I had to do was log in...And here we are...Thankyou Nezzer! Bring TC Back pls....

[Radioguylogs]

YEAH !!!!!!

[johnstewart]

Looking good, Nezzer; thank you!

I know you said you'd set redirects in for xs11.com to here.... I wonder, do you think you'll be able to redirect specific posts?

For example, if someone is looking for an old post, a lot of which are indexed... have it take you to the migrated post on xs11.club? Looking at the post #'s, I'm guessing not (that'd be a big project)?

[nezzer]

JohnStewart, once I setup the redirect on xs11.com to xs11.club, any links to the old forum will end up here. I will setup that redirect tomorrow night. I am waiting a bit in case some issues pops up on the new website because once that redirect goes in, you won't be able to access xs11.com any more.

The old vBulletin 3 software (used on xs11.com) has a very different URL structure than vBulletin 5 (used here). I previously confirmed with the vBulletin team that vBulletin3 URLs will still correctly resolve in vBulletin5.

What all of this means that when you click on a link in google or somewhere for a specific forum post in xs11.com, you will end up looking at the correct post on xs11.club. It should be seamless, so long as JP keeps the xs11.com server up and running so it can provide that redirect to xs11.club.

There are a few moving parts to make all of that work. If old links still work, and they should, great! If not, well at least we got an updated site.

[tarzan]

Wow. I don’t come to XS11 often anymore but have always loved the site. Great people and a lot of expertise. It just got way too cumbersome to get on and stay logged in .
thank you for reviving and taking ownership nezzer!

[MartyA]

nezzer - thanks for all the work!! Good job!!