Upgrade of the Chat Page Software - Early Warning

[admin]

Folks,

The PHPBB software used on this chat page is getting very out of date therefore I have decided that I will update the software to the latest release, we currently run v2.0.22 and the new version will be v3.0.8.

This will allow ease of update to future releases and also I hope it will reduce the number of spammers trying to access the board by making it more resilient to mass registration software.

I will do the upgrade ASAP but will let you know the time and date since there will be no user access to the board whilst the upgrade is in progress.

There will be some look and feel changes but the basic operation will be the same and the URL will be different but I will setup a redirect to the new location from this so your favorites will still work.

All users and posts will be migrated across so you will be able to resume any conversations etc.

Hope that helps,

Martin Searle
Sprint 15 Webmaster

[Martin Searle]

Comarades,

Having run a test of the upgrade using the last backup of the database on a standalone machine I feel confident that this update can be accomplished pretty quickly ( a couple of hours or so).

I will do this upgrade at Lunchtime today since it seems pretty quiet here at the moment. From 12.00 the forum will be set to being inactive to allow all the data to be dumped out of it and converted to the new forums format. The new forum is run by a more recent version of the PHPBB software used at the momment.

I will post an update on the homepage when the work is completed.

The current www.sprint15.com/forum URL will hopefully take you to the new forums URL which will be www.sprint15.com/forum3. Hopefully this will mean that you the users will not need to do anything but you may like to update any favorites you may have to the new location when everything is up and running.

The new forum has a nicer look and has more capabilities in addition to being better future proofed.

If it does go wonky I can always re-enable this forum!

Martin S.

[admin]

Ahh A slight delay in setting up my machine that will do the offline part of the upgrade so it will be later in the afternoon now!

Martin

[admin]

Ahh A slight delay in setting up my machine that will do the offline part of the upgrade so it will be later in the afternoon now!

Martin

The board upgrade has been completed! If you find something that doesn't work let me know.

You can now upload Avatar images should you wish to do so.

Hope that helps,

Martin Searle

[Martin Searle]

From an admin point of view the update of the software has had a very positive effect in terms of thwarting the spambots that kept creating accounts on the old version of the software, down from over 100 per day to 0! But I guess we'll see.

[Liam]

What settings are you using to outwit them?

[Martin Searle]

What settings are you using to outwit them?

The new board has better verification pictures in that they are trickier to read by computer programmes and also there is a blocklist for some spambots so the combo of the two seems to be getting rid of them for the time being.

Martin S.