• BladeForums.com has upgraded to vBulletin 4.1.2

      by
      Spark
      Published on 04-04-2011 10:12 PM  Number of Views: 4648  
      8 Comments Comments
      We're still chasing down the last few bugs, but we've successfully upgraded the site from vBulletin 3.8.7 to version 4.1.2.

      Why did we upgrade when things were working just fine before?
      Good question. In their infinite wisdom, vBulletin decided that they were no longer going to support the 3.x series of their forum software and declared it End of Life. When that happened, we had several choices

      • Wait, and hope for the best
      • Update the software immediately
      • Switch platforms to another forum software solution

      Of the 3 choices, we decided to update immediately, the reasoning being that it would be better to tackle this hurdle now rather than wait longer and fall further behind.

      Nothing. Comes. Easy. With. BladeForums.
      You may have noticed some downtime last week. Yeah, about that... in order to upgrade to 4.1.2, we first had to update MySQL and PHP on the servers. Normally this would be accomplished by using some sort of package manager, however CentOS (which is the operating system our servers run on) didn't have updated MySQL and PHP packages ready... so that required manual recompiling. Resulting in downtime for parts of Tues, Wed and Thurs. We finally got PHP and MySQL configured correctly, and were set to update the software, which took place late Thursday / early Friday. April fools everyone, your forums experience changed!

      Since then, I've been bug stomping and I think we have just about everything covered that's going to be at this point.

      I've given up on trying to get mod rewrite to work properly on the site. It wasn't worth having the thread display options not functional for the last few days, so I switched the forums to an advanced rewrite URL mode.

      Mobile Users should be pretty happy: Berryblab and Tapatalk have both been installed. Wootles for you guys. I should force all mobile users to pay for a premium membership.

      Anyhow, there's loads of new features now:

      • New and improved search
      • Threads are marked unread until you've actually read them
      • New attachments feature
      • Blogs
      • Facebook integration
      • User customizable styles
      • more stuff I can't remember.

      It's been a long few days. I'll write more when I can.
      Comments 8 Comments
      1. EthicalMan's Avatar
        EthicalMan - 04-23-2011, 12:11 PM
        Sparks, how do I join the site & support it beyond registering.
        Thanks & Happy Easter,
        EthicalMan
        PS New to Blogs & Forums
      1. Esav Benyamin's Avatar
        Esav Benyamin - 04-23-2011, 01:10 PM
        Probably best to ask this on Tech Support at http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/fo...dback-amp-More

        I don't know how to move a post there from this forum, it seems more like a blog.

        Basically, we have different levels of membership, listed here:
        http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/payments.php
      1. howieareyu's Avatar
        howieareyu - 04-27-2011, 07:57 PM
        I guess I'll be the first to CONGRATULATE you on the effort you're gone through.
        I've worked in IT for 30+ years and understand the work involved to (sounds like) do a multi-version upgrade. THANK YOU for your dilligence and as my Italian friends in Easta Bost (East Boston) say "Molto Bene!" Howie
      1. BG42EDGE's Avatar
        BG42EDGE - 05-07-2011, 01:47 PM
        I may be in the minority, but I say WELL-DONE.

        This may be a lot more about the Blackberries and such than we know. I don't use a smart phone like that, but there's been an explosion of people who do.

        Anyhow, things are working just fine for me.

      1. oregonknifenerd's Avatar
        oregonknifenerd - 04-06-2012, 07:17 PM
        If you ever could use my assistance with this stuff let me know. This sort of stuff is what I do for my day job [when I'm not posting here!] although I run on Debian and FreeBSD. I probably wouldn't be much help on the OS stuff since I haven't used a Redhat based distro since they went to Fedora Core and Debian and Ubuntu pushed ahead for a number of things. But most of the LAMP stuff should be the same as the PHP-Apache-MySQL stack is going to be the same across distros. I'd be more than happy to contribute on a more meaningful level than just posting snarky comments in the Kershaw subforum.
      1. tamhogan's Avatar
        tamhogan - 04-15-2012, 02:12 AM
        hey spank i was interested in your alligator hides
      1. RubiconSS's Avatar
        RubiconSS - 04-19-2012, 04:16 PM
        Thank You, Few can imagine the work (and frustration) that goes into making it "look" easy
        Thanks again.
        Rubi
      1. Buck_Fan's Avatar
        Buck_Fan - 04-28-2012, 08:32 PM
        I want to thank you for all your hard work so we can enjoy the forums. It is very much appreciated.

        Thanks,

        Bill