Pattayatalk upgrade is finally complete. (Background processes are finished)

[frostfire]

Hi guys,

The background processes have finally finished, so all old posts should now appear properly (photos, links, etc). That makes the upgrade finally complete. 

I have also turned on enforcement of SSL, so all parts of the forum should now show as SECURE in your browser. This is something pattayatalk has never had, so please let me know if you have any problems because of it. 

Moving forward the costs for the site have gone up quite a bit, with the SSL and Email solutions (and I am working on doing email locally instead to save that cost), I will be looking in to putting some banners of some kind up. But I will keep them out of view if possible (down at the bottom of the page for instance). The exception to that being in the Open Forum for people not logged in. For some reason we get a LOT of google referral traffic to the open forum from people that never register for an account - somewhere in the neighborhood of 15000 page impressions per week. I am going to try to leverage that if I can. The costs for the site are still fairly low - less than $300 per year, so with any luck I can find a good solution that doesn't inconvenience any of our members. So... if you see something annoying, please tell me. Ill need feedback on this if I'm to make it work. There is also the possibility that the ads will eventually be banned because of the website content, though the provider I am looking at say that's not the case. Will also be looking at other solutions that are more in-line with what our members need - like the Agoda link that is now outdated (I will replace it), and I will start looking for local sponsors as well. This stuff will start to pop up in the next few days.... All I ask is that if you have no major objections, please turn off your ad-blocker for this site. I will not be adding any code to detect and enforce that like the asshats over at Thaivisa do, so this is the only request you will see... if you ignore it, I will never know or judge you for it. That you know of anyway. lol. 

Now as to email. As I was performing this upgrade I found out one really weird fact. While martin was really good about answering emails sent to his pattayatalk related Gmail account, for some reason he had the boards email blocked (admin@pattayatalk), and moreover, the old server was not even configured to receive mail from admin@pattayatalk, which means that all of the times someone hit CONTACT and sent a message, or all of the times someone responded to any of the emails sent by the forums, Martin never even saw them. Since fixing this problem yesterday I have received about 8 contact forum requests - 3 of which were for problem signing in where their email was no longer valid, so I don't even want to guess how many went unanswered over the last couple years. That will not happen again. I am still unable to receive mail to the admin@pattayatalk address (I am working on that), but in the meantime I have redirected the contact form and response emails to use the boards gmail account. So far that seems to be working. So if any of you send a request via any method and I do not respond, please let me know via PM and I will find and fix the problem.

Another change coming soon will be the addition of some sort of chat system for the board. I have not found one I like yet, but if nothing else I will design on myself. Will have something in place in the coming weeks. 

Anyhoo... the site is now fully functional and hopefully issue-free. And a full 2 days before the barcrawl. ?

[TheFiend]

Well done Frosty!!!!