We are back!

[Thotos]

I know very few people use the forum these days so probably most of you never realised it was missing! In fact the last post on the forum was on November 11th  2021. Shortly after that, our ISP GoDaddy (or as I call them, GoSchmucks)  decided to migrate our website and forum to a new server. With new server came new software and unfortunately our very old forum (actually went live on November 10, 2006, 09:52:10 PM ) was incompatible with the later version of PHP, the scripting language used for a lot of websites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP).

Our forum needed PHP version 5.4 or older (admittedly support for 5.4 ended in March 2015 🙁 ) but the new server only offered versions 5.6.4 to 8.1. Having failed to convince GoSchmucks to relocate our website and forum to an older server with the 'correct' (for us) software, I decided to have a go at getting our old forum to work with the newer versions of PHP. And that's when I realised that I am nowhere near as good as I used to be with such things. I used to be able to write PHP scripts in my sleep while dreaming about coffee and pizza but after nearly 3 years of retirement and possibly some old age senility settling in, I needed a lot of head scratching and Googleing (actually Binging) to do the simplest tasks 🙁 So I am sorry to say that it has taken me over a month and several sleepless nights at the keyboard to get the forum to work again. But as Thomas Edison once said, I haven't failed 1000 times, I just found 1000 things that didn't work! I must also add that in the nearly 2 months that the forum has been broken, only one person emailed me to ask why. I am therefore assuming that our other 1,106 members never realised.

So, welcome back, and a Happy New Year to you all. Let's start planning 3ma22 before the forum gets broken again!

(attached photo is purely for attention and to check that attachments work  )

[jasonh131]

Yay ....

[parrish]

Hugo looking as good as ever, did you ever get that over heating problem sorted?

[Dan 131]

Thank you Theo, sounds like an awful lot of your time and effort has gone in to get everything working again.

My new year's resolution: Make more use of this wonderful forum again!

Happy new year everyone

Dan

[kev131]

Where’s the LIKE button?! 

[Thotos]

Where’s the LIKE button?! 

  that requires a few more sleepless nights  I need my beauty sleep first.... 

[parrish]

Where’s the LIKE button?! 

👍

[Thotos]

Where’s the LIKE button?!  

👍

[parrish]

The clocks wrong! Just saying.

[Thotos]

The clocks wrong! Just saying.

*** BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING, READ THE NEXT MESSAGE ***

No, the clock is wrong for you! This is an international forum so time depends on where in the world you are. The default time is the server's time which is somewhere in East USA so 6 hours behind the UK. You need to set your time zone in the settings. Click PROFILE at the top to view your profile, then select Look and Layout Preferences on the left and set the time offset to -6 or click Auto Detect and it'll set it for you. Don't forget to click Change Profile at the bottom right to save the new setting.

[Thotos]

OK, ignore everything I said above as I've changed the server time to UK. I'm leaving the post above for anyone who is not in the UK so will need to set their time to their local timezone by clicking Auto-Detect.

[alan.acs]

Good job Theo,

[Thotos]

Where’s the LIKE button?! 

 

[Thotos]

Where’s the LIKE button?!  

This is a BIG cheat but I've added a 'like' button to the Smiley list. So if you want to 'Like' something, simply reply with 'Quote' and add the Like smiley at the bottom  Or you can add the like button anywhere in your text by entering the word LIKE in square brackets [LIKE]. So wherever you type [LIKE] it will change to  

[Phil]

Yay congratulations to getting the site up and running again. I have missed the site & been regularly checking 😊