Topic: Sorry about the outage.....

[Ed Wenn]

Hi All, you'll no doubt have noticed that we've been away for a day or two. Sorry about that. I've been in various Chat sessions with our Web host for most of this evening and it transpires that the version of PHP that our part of Bluehost was using had been 'upgraded' to ver 7.0. This is apparently a bad thing...in that everything falls apart when PHP ver 7 is in town (or at least in Filmwasters land).

Bluehost put us back to PHP ver 5.6 and, hey presto, we're back online again.

If you were patient, then thanks for your patience. If you were angry and frustrated, then thanks for your passion.

[Francois]

Yeah!
Just like I thought, server upgrade...

Thanks Ed for taking care of it

[Bryan]

Thanks for fixing it Ed!

[Ed Wenn]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand again!!! Grr. The site was up for about 10 hours and then everything went offline again this morning (UK time). I've just got off a chat with their tech people. Apparently it won't happen again.

Apparently.

[Francois]

I guess they haven't read the note left on a post it note glued to the side of the computer...

I'm wondering if it would be worth upgrading the forum software once again (grinding my teeth just thinking about it) to future-proof the site for some time?
Thing is I remember how much of a pain it was for you last time you did this... 

[Ed Wenn]

I have just checked the SMF version and it's up to date No need to change anything here.

[Francois]

Now that is weird that it needs such an old version of PHP...
But on the other hand, nightmare avoided

[Indofunk]

Sounds like the template being used doesn't support PHP>5.6. At some point this will need to be changed, because someday PHP5.6 will not be available. If we had unlimited resources, the best option would probably be to create a dev site, clone the live site to it, and test out different templates with PHP7 and get it working before cloning it back to the live site. Of course, I know that we don't have unlimited resources, so I'm not sure if or how we would do it, but this is basically a band aid until PHP5.6 goes bye bye for good

That being said, many thanks to Ed, who is our resource, for bringing us back from the dead!

[Nigel]

I know almost nothing about this stuff, but is it just a case of buying an updated version of the forum software?

[Francois]

Well... not really since SMF is free and open source.

[Nigel]

Well... not really since SMF is free and open source.

OK, I'll leave it to those that know!

[Francois]

You don't have to.
Often computer stuff is like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Sometime it sticks, often it doesn't.

[Pete_R]

Is it just me or has there been two more periods when the forum was down since the first time? Last one yesterday.

[Kai-san]

No, it's not only you. I have observed two more outages as well.

[Pete_R]

Thanks Kai.

[Francois]

I emailed Ed about them. We might have found a solution to prevent this from happening to the forums again. But we might eventually loose the galleries in the process so it's a big decision...