Hi Everyone and welcome back to the new and improved FW forum
Sorry for the sudden outage and the lack of warning, but it was all for a good cause.
First off I'd like to extend
our most heartfelt thanks to Satish (aka
Indofunk) for volunteering his technical services at some point last year in a response to a cry for help when the site went offline briefly due to our host performing an upgrade that the forum software couldn't deal with. As a result of that offer, we've been talking to him for a few months about a plan to get the much-neglected forum (and other parts of the site) brought into the 21st Century in terms of software versions, security, functionality etc. The aim is to future proof things to keep it all ticking over in a more stable configuration and to prevent the forum going offline the second that there's a whisper of an upgrade in the background.
There's really never a good time to do something like this - and there's a day job to consider too - so Satish bit the bullet this weekend and went ahead with the upgrade work. This is 2021, so naturally things didn't go as smoothly as they could have, but with a lot of Googling, some clever manual workarounds, backups, restores, possibly a fair amount of coffee and a
ton of PMA (look it up), Satish has everything back online....
.....we think
Satish, myself and Damion have tested things out as much as we can without spending hours on it and to our eyes everything seems to work as before. BUT, there will likely be the odd thing that has been missed in our testing, so please let us know in this thread what it is that you're finding missing/problematic/broken etc. Obviously, there are only so many hours in the day so Satish won't be able to fix things immediately, but it will be helpful for us to have a snagging list here for reference.
LOOK & FEEL:Now the first thing you'll no doubt have noticed is that the forum's theme has changed. It's actually currently set to the SMF default as this was one aspect of the original forum that we weren't able to preserve during the upgrade process. No matter; it's just a temporary situation and I will get to work on implementing a new theme - hopefully one which has the same uncluttered feel as the old one - as soon as possible. I will also address the missing 'Rank' icons and descriptions at the same time.
Thanks again to Satish...he really has saved the forum; without him things would have become impossible to manage.