Charmed Quark Support forums down

Dean Roddey

Dean Roddey

Senior Member
Our support forum has been down all day. I reported this problem over 12 hours ago now, and they still haven't fixed it. The only thing they did was reinstall the phpBB software, in a default state so that there's no access control and some freaking porn-bot posted an ad for a long list of porn sites, which is now our contribution to the home automation community for today.

Our ISP (www.ixwebhosting.com) are all too often a waste of space. We've had so many problems with down time on the web site and suport forum. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, and I think that at this point they have lost a customer and we'll be looking for some dedicated co-hosting arrangement somewhere else.

Anyway, sorry about the downtime. Hopefully all of you people with real lives were busy doing holiday stuff anyway. If it's not up tomorrow when I wake up, I dread to think of the next level nasty-gram I'm going to have to cut loose with.
 
Dean,
If you have a contract with them rhis would be a breach of contract I believe and you could use whoever you wanted.
 
Dean, was your site using the latest php software version? Cinemar's host took down our site a few weeks ago as we hadn't updated the version and there was some issue that the host thought it prudent to take it down until it was updated.

I just deleted two porn / gambling posts on Cinemar's forum as well. What a waste of time and energy.
 
I would also recommend against going with phpbb again, it is a big security risk. I recommend Invision or vBulletin. Good luck!
 
Well, see that's part of the problem. They don't allow you to install anything yourself. You get what's there. I had a big argument about this (and no shell access either, just their web-basd thing), and their response is that it helps insure up time (hah!) because users are limited in what they can do and install.
 
Well I checked the database, and the problem is that it's empty. I can't believe that they would be so incompetent as to not notice this and put back a backup, but I pointed this out so hopefully they'll restore the old database contents. If they come back and say they don't have a backup, I'm going to go completely ballistic.
 
Well, screw'em anyway. I just signed up at softlayer.com for a dedicated Window Server 2003 box. It's a dual core 2.8Ghz box wiht 2GB cache per core, 250GB SATAII hard drive, and 1GB of memory. It's a little expensive, but it should serve us well for a good while, and it'll put us in charge of our own destiny. They have good monitoring services, remote reboot, regular pings with e-mail notifications if they fail, local NAS based backup within their network so I can back our system up periodically within their network, etc...

Importantly, it's a Windows based box, so I can write web services stuff using my own code. So we'll be able to dump the esellerate store and provide our own front end to the component selection and ordering process, so it'll be far nicer.

It's going to eat up a couple days of my time at least, unfortunately, getting everything over to the new system and figuring out IIS which I've not really dealt with before. But it'll be worth it to get our own machine that we can manage and install what we want and/or need.
 
Sounds good Dean... Will we have a better search engine this time? May I suggest something similar one AVS one?
 
Dean..if possible I would highly suggest at this time converting the forum from PhpBB to Vbulletin, they do have an importer as long as you have the old phpbb database it can be imported into a new copy of Vbulletin.

**If you decide to go again with PhpBB for security turn on "image verification" for new sign ups and also turn off "Guest" posting...this should stop or at least slow the porn spambots..unless they have money to burn on software they won't easily get past the image verification..its not easy to beat unless you are a professional spammer or know of the tools they use to defeat it.

I have run forums in the past in excess of 50000 members and have never had a problem with reliabilty with Vbulletin, then again in your case it seems the ISP is to blame in the case..good luck getting everything restored Dean!!
 
ellisr63 said:
Sounds good Dean... Will we have a better search engine this time? May I suggest something similar one AVS one?
Click to expand...
AVS and Homeseer forums are both using Vbulletin forum software, the search feature is light years ahead of PHPbb search.
 
Yeh, I'm looking at that also. Take all the pain at once. I won't be able to get the actual database. So I guess I'll have to do a phpAdmin and export the database to a text file and then download that, and then import it into a database on the new machine, then use that as the source for the upgrade.

The thing is, I think that the minimium phpBB importable version is a slight notch higher than ours. So I may have to first set up a working phpBB upgraded to the latest version, and then do the import.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top