Welcome to the new Pattayatalk.com! Please read this first!

[frostfire 1,197]

Hi Guys,

The upgrade process has been successful. It was started at 3am Thai time, and it is now 6:13am as I write this. The forum is up and seems to be working fine, and as soon as I submit this post (and assuming it works - this is the last test), I will be redirecting all old traffic to this new forum post, so you will see it first if you are visiting from the old URL. 

So, first off. The new URL. I have changed the forums URL to https://forums.pattayatalk.com  (it used to be pattayatalk.com/forums).  This change comes with some drawbacks, mostly involving google and content already indexed, but the advantages of having it greatly outweigh the negatives. The largest of these allows me to host the forums on a Linux server, which is very fast and good at hosting php forums, and the front end website (not yet completed) that will be visible at pattayatalk.com on a windows server, which allows me to develop a rich website in a language I am more familiar with. 

Second. The new logo. I paid a Pakistani guy for this logo upgrade... but I have had a mixed review on it. I am totally open to changing it, and its been suggested by Keyman that we ask you guys if one of you is a graphic artist, if you want to give the creation of a new logo a shot. If you can and feel like giving it a go, please do! We will have a public poll on logo entries (including this current one) and let you guys decide which to keep. 

Third, please note: it can take up to a week for the upgrade process to fully finish processing old posts. Until that process is done, posts may have messed up quote markers, bad or poorly formatted photos, or other issues that make them look wrong in some way. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do to speed this process up. I was able to run it manually on the test server which took 3 days, but doing that here now with a live forum would result in speed issues that are just not worth it in the end. The process works by processing approx. 50 items every time someone visits the forum. (provided that one group of 50 is not currently running when that visit starts). There are about 3 million items to process, so obviously this will take some time. Be patient 🙂

I am going to wait until those background processes completely finish before turning on other new features, and I will create a new post describing each of those as I turn them on. The exception to that wait is the new SSL certificate. That is active already, but not enforced. So you can manually browse to https://forums.pattayatalk.com for a secure session. I will enforce HTTPS traffic exclusively after the background processes complete. (HTTPS does take more server processing time to process, and slightly slows down downloads). 

So... so far it appears my months long practice sessions worked pretty well. I am happy with the outcome, so far. I was able to take the process from 12 hours (first attempt), to 3 hours, and with 100% of the errors and issues (there were over 200 of them), handled by my scripts during the upgrade. So we should be good to go. 

Let me know what you think, and I will update again once the background processes are completed.  As I understand it the more traffic we have the faster that will go 🙂

 

Frosty

[frostfire 1,197]

One more update: EMAIL will not be working today. I know that its not working, and I am purposely not fixing it yet. I will do that either later today or tomorrow. 

[frostfire 1,197]

UPDATE: Tapatalk has now been fixed and should be working properly. 

[frostfire 1,197]

UPDATE: Email is now back up and working. 

For the time being, until I can get a count of the number of emails we send out daily, I am using sendgrid for email service, to ensure that they all get out ok. Its free for 40k emails for the first month, then 100 per day (for free). If we go over the 100 per day (very likely), ill have to either change up or pay a monthly fee. Will see how it goes. 

[frostfire 1,197]

UPDATE: Email is still having some minor issues. 

This means the CONTACT FORM and the FORGOT PASSWORD links may not work correctly. 

if you are a member and having any issues that require our notice, like you cannot log in, feel free to email me directly at flbbar@gmail.com, at least until I get this sorted out. 

[frostfire 1,197]

UPDATE: The email issue has been resolved. The contact form now works properly. 

Important: I know at least 2 people sent contact form requests that were not received, and 3 others used the forgot password link and did not receive their emails. Due to the nature of the system I do not know who these people were and I cannot resend that info. Hopefully whoever you are you are reading this and will try again now :)