As you might have observed, over the past year D3football.com (and to a lesser extent, D3hoops.com) has suffered occasional slowdowns, times at which one site or the other would move at a crawl because of high traffic.
We attempted to alleviate that in February by moving D3hoops.com’s message board, Posting Up, onto a separate server within the same host. While that worked, it was only a temporary measure — we have more planned.
Unfortunately, our message board software itself, which we have been using since Posting Up opened in November 1998, is part of the problem. Although we love Discus because it was written by programmers associated with Hope College, we have outgrown it and it can not support a site of our size.
To this end, we’re changing message board software. We’re also combining Post Patterns with Posting Up and we’re putting the combined message board on a separate server. We believe this will make both D3hoops.com and D3football.com run more smoothly all year.
The new board will also have more modern features, the types of things you’re used to if you use forums on other sites. Your username and password will carry over to the new site and we’ll transfer the posts. To this end, we will temporarily shut down new user registration later in the week, and will shut down the entire board sometime on Saturday evening before the transfer. When all is complete we’ll put up the new link.
If you are registered for both Posting Up and Post Patterns, we are attempting to determine that now so we can combine them into one account, with one post total. We’ll attempt to use your password from Post Patterns, since this sport is more active at the moment.
But the question everyone wants to know the answer to, Pat … do post counts go back to zero? It took me a long time to get to where I am today 🙂
Everybody should write down their totals by friday night for both the hoops and football board in case the totals get wiped out.
To me the quality of the post is much important than the quantity. If it were put to a vote mine would be with eliminating counts altogether.
It’s my intent to keep the post total. At the very least, we won’t lose the existing information, we just won’t be able to transfer it over.
Will the new boards just be one thread for each topic/conference like now or are we going to more of a “EZboard” look with multi-threads under each topic/conference?
Hey, for some reason I have a different name that shows on the screen in Post Patterns (not a different user name, just screen name). Is that going to be an issue?
Cat11, not sure. Probably will try it in the same setup first and see how it goes.
Smed, it will pick one of them. When you log into the new board you can decide whether you like which one it took and change it if necessary.
Alrighty, folks. Post Patterns has been shut down on this server and the move is in progress.
Ugh.
That was painful.
I can’t make it work correctly at this point. Going to go to bed and am re-opening the boards here. Might be another week until we get it all up and running.
If it makes it any easier, why not start from scratch and not copy over the existing discussions? Is there really anything here, before the season starts, that people would lose much sleep over losing?
Sorry you had a tough time of it …
“lose sleep over losing.” Yeah, that’s some skillful prose.
That’s one of the things I’m considering, definitely.
And it’s ok — it wasn’t a redundant usage. You’re fine.
I have been spun out into the blogosphere and can no longer post (short lived forum career) It does not recognize my user name and password and I cannot re-register. What should I do? Standing by.
Standing by is the right answer. Hopefully 24 hours from now we’ll be up and running on the new board and we’ll fix any dropped accounts at that point.
It’s done. Come see us at http://www.d3sports.com/post/