frostfire
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Posts posted by frostfire
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Hi Guys. Sorry for the late reply on this, but this website will be changing homes in the next couple days and due to the extreme number of things I have to do there will be little to no warning before it happens. I am going to do everything I can to minimize the downtime, but there will be some.
I will give a longer explanation as to why later, but the short version is the datacenter I have hosted my dozen servers with for the last 15 years is closing down on short notice and I must move all my servers to a new datacenter... and while this website is personally important to me, the other sites and services hosted on the other servers are what makes me the money I need to keep living the good life... so I have to prioritize those ?
Once I start moving this site it will go offline and stay offline until the transfer is complete. If I had to estimate I would say 4 hours? But that is just a "pull it out your ass" number as I have no idea what the network on the new servers is like yet... I wont know until they are online sometime in the next 48 hours. AS soon as they re online I will be moving sites over in the order they come up in my server list, which is kinda random. Bear with me and ill have it done as quickly as I can ?
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Its been done. Welcome to the board.
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yup, this is on me. Give me a couple more hours. Just waking up and heading to work - will process it when I get there.
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5 minutes ago, forcebwithu said:
When you catch your breath, one of features lost in the upgrade was the back to top of page option. On 247 and PA they have it implemented as an icon in the lower right corner of the page.
Yup, our plugins were turned off, and at least one of them are out of date. I did not want to turn them on while I was tired in case they broke something. Will get them back on today.
Also, just got a quote of $250 for a fully customized theme with unlimited changes for a week. So I might just do that. Ill post a poll later asking for color suggestions.
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13 minutes ago, forcebwithu said:
@frostfire thank you for the large amount of time and effort you have put in, and just put in to keep this forum up and running.
Chances are you encountered the same problems with the upgrade script that PA and then 247 had to deal with during their upgrade. It's to your credit and expertise it took you less than two days to resolve the issues. PA and 247 took much longer.
As for the theme, I believe whatever customized theme you had in the old version was lost with the upgrade.
And for BM's that are seeing this upgraded version of the forum software for the first time, off the top of my head some key differences are:
- no more page numbers (the software guys at Invision decreed they are too old fashion and don't deserve to be in a modern forum)
- The Report, Share and Edit options are now in the upper right corner of a post under the ellipsis.
- Under your profile settings you now have Content View Behavior which allows you to change the setting so clicking on a topic title will take you to the latest, unread content in the topic.
Cheers for that.
Sometime today I will actually take a minute and look in to it. And start working on a new theme.... Or maybe ill just hire someone to do a better one this time. If this thing didn't broadside my ass I would have made screenshots etc to "save" what I could of the theme. Live and learn lol.
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1 hour ago, Shooter said:
Hope I didn't come across as complaining. I mean - it is free and no obligation on your part. I do appreciate the forum.
Not at all ?
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1 hour ago, Shooter said:
Seems like it was down over 12 hours from the USA. Could be wrong.
Ya that was tongue in cheek. It was about 1.5 days. Almost 2 days.
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Hi Guys.
A couple of you early birds might have noticed that the site was down for 3 or 4 minutes....
So... I am going to give a nice long explanation on what happened later... after I get some sleep. It took me almost 2 days of full time work with almost no sleep at all to get this fixed. In short just so you guys don't go crazy with the speculation, it was a catastrophic failure of invision's auto upgrade script along with my dumb ass not seeing that there was an error message that cancelled the backup I took just before I hit the upgrade button. So ya. That happened.
I will update this thread with a longer explanation as soon as I get some rest.
Oh.. ya. The theme. I have no idea whats going on with the theme. and to be honest I am too tired to look at it right now. The site works, and while its ugly... well... its better than nothing. Ill get the theme fixed ASAP.
Frosty
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8 minutes ago, Bazle said:
Thanks, Frosty.
I clicked on the link at the top of the page which says "Staff".
Ok, ill check and see what that button actually does later tonight... not sure where it gets its data... but its not all moderators ?
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That is not correct.
Not sure where you got that list... our mods are listed there, but other non-mods are as well.
As of right now we have 6 mods plus myself.
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Yup, in the freezers at Friendship. I have also seen it at Villa market, but not as frequently. I have always found it at friendship when I needed it.
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2 hours ago, Grin Grasser said:
When I registered an account, the forum directed me to go to my email address to verify. I did.
I logged in and posted my query.
Forum said, a moderator had to check my post before it would appear.
Did not see a link to get out of moderation.
Today, I logged in. Did not see a link to get of moderation. Went to my email account. Saw a 2nd email from this forum, which said that my registration was complete. Went to the 1st email and click on the verify link again. Logged into this forum. Writing this post, I see a window above, "Your content will need to be approved by a moderator."
What is missing?
You have done step 1... Just need to do step 2 ?
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Hi grin,
Not going to comment on the substance of your post, but if you want to get out of moderation (and see all of the forums!), please click the link at the top of your screen about verifying your account and go thru that process. Will make your posts show up faster, and make things easier for the mods ?
Frosty
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37 minutes ago, Bullfrog said:
I carry 3 when out walking. They quickly get wet and deep breathing is difficult for me. There are a few YT vids of doctors "proving" that oxygen intake isn't restricted .... but they are in aircon environment sitting at their desks.Try the same test in the heat and humidity after walking for a couple of hours..!!!!!
But yes ... sneeze into the mask then bin it and replace it...
Agreed. Even in aircon breathing is .... maybe not difficult, but noticeably more difficult with a mask on. Its doable, especially in public and its totally needed in these times, but lying about it helps nobody.
I use washable and re-usable masks tho... so I do not bin them. Just put them in the wash with everything else. Not as good as a N95 maybe, but a lot cheaper and almost as good - at least for here in Thailand where covid is suppressed for the time being. But ya, once you sneeze in to it, there is no more wearing that one lol. Nasty. lol.
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Not excusing the behavior by any means as it is very rude at the least... but he might have severe allergies.
I have really fucked up allergies, and on bad days wearing a mask is like torture, especially if sneezing. And sneezing in to the mask would pretty much ruin it.
Again, not excusing him - he should have just sneezed in to the mask and then put on a new one - thats what I do. But you can only carry so many of the damn things.
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I tried editing this so that the video would show instead of the link, but apparently IPB doesn't like that link. But it is a good and safe link, so I'll just leave it.
Welcome to the board Manmohan. You might want to follow the directions for verifying your account by clicking on the menu item above and following those directions so that your posts are not moderated.
Frosty
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Ok guys,
This change has been made and completed... there was a good 12 hour window where emails were not going out. I am not going to have the system re-send those emails since almost all of them were just new post notifications.
Looking back thru the logs, it appears that about half of the emails our system was trying to send out were blocked because we were over the limit of that other service... so we should see a much better result now being on our own server.
If anyone sees any email related issues from here out, please let me know.
Frosty
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Ok guys,
So since the board has been upgraded I have been using a 3rd party email service called SendGrid. Its free, but its limited to 100 emails per day... and while I don't fully understand their limits since it has let us go up to 120% sometimes and sometimes it doesn't... its been a bit of a pain overall because we go over 100 emails 9 days out of 10, resulting in many emails not going out - including "forgot password" and other important emails.
The underlying issue is that email is very complicated to set up properly, and I am not a linux expert... e.g. I was not confident enough in my linux skills to properly set email up to make sure all the different gotchas are covered.
That all changed about a year back when I took over control of a hosting company from another pattaya expat that passed away. Those server were also linux, and since taking that business over I have had to learn all the things I didn't know before... so while im still far from an expert, I have been able to get things sorted out where I feel comfortable with it. Sooooooo I just switched us over from using a non-exiting "admin@pattayatalk" email via sendgrid to a real "forums@pattayatalk" email running on a different server, but still in my rack... that way if email starts getting hammered it won't slow down the forums. So we are now up on that and all limits have been removed... so feel free to subscribe to whatever threads you want from here on ?
It will be 24 hours before I know for sure its working... but the tests have passed, so it looks good.
Frosty
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Hi guys. Just a quick note to let you know that there will be some changes to the board email notifications system coming in the next 48 hours and that starting tomorrow your thread notifications may be missing or delayed for up to 24 hours. Hopefully just a matter of minutes but it may be longer. I'll post a longer explanation of what I did and why tomorrow.
Frosty
Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk
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Hi Guys,
So earlier today I took the server down for normal maintenance (installing updates) as I do once every 3 months. Since my last update in November (ya ya ya I know, but come on... things have been fucked up. So I'm a little late!), one of this servers 2 power supplies has stopped communicating with my control suite. That probably means that the power supply has failed. I have redundant everything on my servers, so it didn't just die... but that power supply will need to be replaced, which unfortunately cannot be done while the server is turned on. I have asked my data center to secure the needed parts and schedule the downtime with me to perform the install... as soon as I know a date and time I will let you guys know. Likely to be a 1 hour downtime as I am going to have a couple other things replaced at the same time.
When I have the time and date I will change the title of this post and pin it.
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Server is back up and running. Sorry about that guys.
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HI Guys,
I am about to reboot the server hosting this website. Sorry I did not give more notice... I am doing my bi-yearly maintenance and didn't notice this was the server housing Ptalk. Its ready for the reboot now, so im afraid most of you won't see this message until after the server is back up from its downtime. I expect downtime to be less than 30 minutes, but more likely just 5-10.
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Hi Guys,
A comment was made by Teelak earlier today about the state of the board and the number of COVID and Political posts going up on it right now.
This is a really hard topic to police in any real way for a couple reasons - first because COVID is a very important subject and has a very huge impact on all of our lives and will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Its a health matter, and a science matter... and in a perfect world it would NOT be a political matter. But it has been hijacked by politicians around the world and made in to a political matter.
I will not be banning COVID related posts or removing them to purgatory because the subject is of such importance to the entire world right now - but going forward we are going to have a strict no politics rule on all posts outside of the politics section of the forums, including the COVID threads. This is going to be super-hard to moderate because there is so much misinformation out there which is politically motivated. We will err on the side of science. Meaning that if a post contains content that is being used by a politician or group of politicians to try to steer conversation in a particular direction, then its political be it true or not. For example: hydroxychloroquine. No matter which side of that fence you sit on, that entire subject is too highly politicized to have a place in COVID discussions outside of the political forums. So are any other drugs (if any) that are touted by politicians. Those subjects are now taboo outside of the politics section, even if there are studies backing their use. If politics are involved, it does not belong on the open forum, period.
Threads that are political in nature (such as topics regarding hydroxychloroquine) will be moved to the politics section.
If a post is made in a non-political thread about things that are political in nature the post will be hidden/removed. If the poster keeps posting stuff like that they will receive a warning, and eventually be banished to the purgatory section where they can post that crap to their heart's content.
Political jabs are also hereby forbidden from outside the politics section. Even veiled ones. No comments about how this or that politician or group are better/wiser/stupider etc. If you really want to play those games, do it in the politics section.
I will leave it up to the mods as to the removal/moving of threads that already exist, or the posts inside those threads. If they are overly acidic, move them. If not, then not. But new threads going forward will be handled with the above ideas in mind.
This "rule" will not be posted to the board rules page, at least for now. We will relax it again after the November elections when things quiet down and there is a little less hatred being spread around (we can only hope). Until then lets consider it a temporary rule brought on by the times.
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SERVER MOVE HAPPENING SOON - PLEASE READ
in == Announcements ==
Posted
UPDATE: Server move is happening today. Will start in about 30-60 minutes. Downtime unknown. Will get it back up as soon as possible.