nice job getting it back. We appreciate you guys

Nice work Austin. Go to bed. haha

This page is permanently on page 1 for me.

Pretty sure all of direckshits and cosmo’s gay kiddie porn is uploaded here. That’s probably a good start to finding out why.

Did y'all make the upgrade to SSD/NVMe yet?

We're back

Welp the server proved that what day of the week it crashes means nothing. By damned it will crash any damn day it pleases.

Back in the day we did radio checks on CB. Now we optimize our server.


Breaker 1-9, need a radio check.....

Loud and clear for sure driver....

This is quickly becoming a "PC Load Letter? What the ****?" type situation.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/RhEvC...giphy.gif&ct=g

I’m just glad that I can now post of the best chiefs (fan) website in the world again. At least until it crashes again.

This is a serious question tho: do we need a monetary donation to aid in an upgrade or something? I’d be willing to do my part, and I’d imagine some of these others would too.

Ha! I thought about that. I wonder if DaFace decided to change that maintenance day to Tuesday after the last time.

I tried going to that old downtime CP forum. Whatever you do, do NOT click that. Just delete the link. Trust me.

Edited

This site is free. I appreciate the work the mods/administrators do for us.

Doesn't bother me that we have downtime here and there.

How come the $20 I donated years ago hasn’t fixed this server shit yet?!?!!

Bugeater: We have a zero tolerance policy for pedo accusations.

A Salt Weapon: Hold my beer.

Better this morning.

I can donate if needed.

That's a cuz $20 back then don't equal $20 these days.

That said, 20 bucks is 20 bucks.

Anybody know what a counter check was?

That’s been a few years. Good lord.

Fess up, it was only $2.

:D

This site crashes and has more failures than the Boeing Max 737 and yet you keeping mocking me about being IN the tech industry.........:doh!:

How I picture the MOD team trying to fix this shit.


https://pansci.asia/wp-content/uploa...e05fe3ed15.jpg

Serious question. Is there a temp forum that we can go to like the old Downtime CP?

Which link were you using? This is the best one at the moment:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/downtime_cp/

That said, it's been migrated twice (not by our choice) since I actually spent any time on it 10-15 years ago, so the interface isn't great.

Serious question. How much does it cost to run CP a year? I haven't donated in a few years and am feeling guilty now.

DaFace is the only mod with access to the database and 1) highly doubt he has access to fix anything at thay level, 2) he isn't even in IT and could probably walk circles around your IT adjacency, and 3) feel free to PM AC with your expert opinion of what's wrong, I'm sure he'd appreciate someone jumping in to fix this free thing you use on his dime.

I spent the time death scrolling the discord server.... reading rabble nonchalantly pointing out several times how "we could all go to "The U"", and reading Baby Lee's ironic and completely random "mod from hell" rant.

I give it 4 clowns (that's out of 10).

:o):o):o):o)

I am all in to donate if needed. And I certainly appreciate this site and the time Mods and Administrators put into this.

I thought scho was formerly a flooring salesman or something. Maybe that was somebody else but it stuck in my brain. He also slept at his office to save money on rent? Was that an IT gig or am I crazy?

From my perspective, the main issue is that we're on software that was written in 2008, and it's so old that we can't even be on the newer versions of PHP and MySQL, so even the backend kind of sucks.

It's compounded by the fact that it's really difficult to "right size" a server for our use case. It needs to be able to handle gameday traffic, but normal volume is only about 10% of that level, so we've got ad revenue* that's about 10% of what we'd need to support peak usage. So it's a lot of duct tape and bubble gum to keep us moving along.

But as you alluded to, I've never claimed to be some sort of IT guru. My only superpower is being willing to spend the time trying to fix things as best I can. AustinChief has far more knowledge than I do but far less time.

In the end, the "right" solution is almost certainly to move to a new server and new software, but 1) it's an astronomical amount of time to do that and 2) the "look and feel" of ChiefsPlanet would change dramatically in the process. We probably just need to rip off the bandaid, but that's easy to say when you're not the one who has to put the hours into it.

*As a note here, I don't actually have any visibility into our ad revenue and costs - that's all AustinChief's territory. I'm just guessing.

You can dish it out but you can't take it.

Crying like a whiny bitch. LMAO

You have some parts correct and some mixed.

This floor is so nice, you can sleep on it

..that shit sells itself.

I'll click on more ads if it means this place will never have the layout of TwoBillsDrive.

Is the server issue more a tech problem or money issue?

If its a money issue, how much?

Lets do a fund raiser.

Oh, it was ...... zvision or something like that. I can't remember what the link says. And, of course, I deleted it

DaFace,
I know it doesn't get said enough but I (and I'm sure many others) really appreciate what you (and Bearcat and others) do to keep us going.

This site is darn near a quarter century old. Crazy to think about it in that perspective.

Yes, this. Thank you. :thumb:

Yeah, that's what it was originally. They got bought out by some other group than then got bought out by Tapatalk.

If it seems like we're going into another era of frequent outages (which I'm optimistic isn't the case), I'll drop that link in the "down for maintenance" page so people can find it. Or if you just Google "Downtime Chiefsplanet," it'll be the first result.

You're going to have to stop eating out for lunch.

I approve this message.

I also concur.

I can afford both.....:rolleyes:

Temps.

All of this! To each and everyone of you for keeping argubly the greatest site on the net!

After all, I'm glad when this site comes back up! It sucks to lose contact with soo many friends on here!

Rip it off and go to vB 6

1. If it's an incredible amount of time to complete, supply a time table and put a fair price to it.
2. If it needs a new server too, let's price that out as well.
3. Let's come up with a number to see if we realistically could raise the money or have a donated server.

We have been talking about this for at least 6-7 years with no parameters.

Maybe some CP members want to be investors in Chiefsplanet.

Maybe create a LP to get this shit finally fixed.

How many "real" members do we have that are truly active on the site?

Xenforo is my preference.

Tell all your own clients that you need to postpone their projects for a few weeks while you work on your hobby Chiefs forum. See how that goes.

We typically see around 1,000 active users per day.

Just looked into it a bit out of curiosity, has anyone looked into "vanilla" or "flarum" as an alternative to vbulletin? They are both free and open source, are more modern builds that can handle updated mySQL versions, and in the case of Vanilla, has an import tool already built that could bring everything over pretty easily. Without seeing the current db and code I can't say for sure, but it might be worth playing around with on the downtime server to see if feasible. If it works out, could convert the main planet site over and there would be a full backup on downtime from testing. Bring over all the user and role info, basic forum and sub forum structures, possibly even the existing posts if wanted. Might make sense to start fresh on the new one and leave the "historical" posts on downtime.

They would probably just wait for the next car to pull up to their corner. :shrug:

At the end of the day, it's Kyle's world, and we're all just living in it. If he needs help, he'll ask.

The software is a minimal cost compared to the hosting.

Bingo.

Then see if you can outsource it. Argentina is cheap.

Jesus Christ I've never seen more excuses or smug ass answers on trying to execute something. :harumph:

If Austin Chief doesn't have the time, try to hire someone.

How about a high school tech guru?

Absolutely but if he could save 3000 a year and have a modern db and site better optimized for the growing user base and traffic, could be a win win. Both of the free options I posted are PHP/mySQL based so shouldn't much in way of a learning curve for anyone working on it if they work on it currently. Hell, if someone wants to send me a copy of the database schema with no data in it, I'd play around and see if I could get something basic working as a proof of concept.

Dude. You don't know what you're talking about. No one would even touch a project like this for less than $10k, and my guess is that it would take more like $30k+. That's why we're always so patient when we have a guy who can do it for free but has trouble finding the time for it.

So sure, the donation button is at the top. Drop $30k on that link, and I'm sure you'll get Kyle's attention. But unless you're up for that, STFU about things you clearly have zero understanding of.

Eh, Xenforo or vBulletin 6 are both around $200 for the software and both have migration tools - that's really not the issue. I'd personally rather go with those rather than something open source since they tend to be better supported.

(But again, only one person's opinion matters here.)

This post ^ comes across poorly, it may not be your intent, so apologies in advance, but..
Quit tracking your shit stained boots across the carpet of whom we are guests.

JFC you can be annoying. Again, for as much as you like to throw around your claims of IT knowledge, you have an incredibly ignorant view of how IT stuff actually works. People are being smug to you because you're a dipshit.

High school tech guru? FFS man...

Xenforo would be a good switch. Really nice software with a very active and growing mod development community.

Dude has zero self awareness.

Constantly talks down to people, will ask a tech question and then call people dumbasses when nobody knows WTF he's talking about while he flaunts his own tech (adjacency) experience, is incapable of distinguishing between the dumbest of shitposters and those who really know their shit because we're all just idiots compared to him, far quicker assumes he knows everything there is to know about a situation so he can talk down to people than simply asking questions and assuming those involved have an IQ over 70, constantly projects his shitty behavior onto others.

....and then after all that over the course of years and thread after thread, is astounded people don't treat him with the utmost respect, like he's somehow a random target from internet assholes.

This place is finished.

I work at a data center and the way they spend money i'd have to imagine that host services must be pretty damn steep. No matter what the direction is, Sho's fundraiser idea couldnt hurt. Even if its just to keep the current set up. Could do something simple like a basic printful store. Complete hands off outside of designing a shirt or something. They print it and ship it. I use one for my drag racing page.

Firstly - I have zero technical expertise in this area and should probably be ignored
Secondly - I, personally, don't place a high value on the histories of this place, the old threads from 5, 10 years ago - even though I have hung out here for 20+ years.

Wildy uninformed proposal: Just migrate user names and info to a new platform and let the users create all new threads for the topics of interest. It would seem like that would be an easier transfer than all the threads, links, pics, etc. For instance, how often do people look back to page 10 of a 30 page thread? I know I don't.

Of course, there should probably be some sort of poll to gauge whether this approach is acceptable to the users.

I'll shut my ignorant and insensitive mouth now.

I deal with SQL tables every ****ing day for my job.

Do you realize how much manpower it takes to migrate from one environment to another? That's not even counting the hours of coding it takes by trial and error to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

On top of that, you're asking people who work actual jobs for a living to prioritize this over their work or to outsource (which leads to an entirely different set of possible issues with regards to security vulnerabilities)?

WTF

I'm not a software engineer nor a developer, so I won't tend to understand the technical aspects regarding migration to a new cloud or server, but I'd be happy to volunteer to help with any SQL related tasks (can write in MySQL/PostgreSQL).

I've wondered about it. Part of our problem is that we have a post table with like 15 million rows, and that gets accessed and sorted literally every time someone loads a thread.

But in theory, that SHOULD be a surmountable problem, and there's no question that the deep history of this place is part of its appeal. I'd be hesitant to just throw all of that out if we can get around it (and I think we can).

The good news is that (as noted above), there are migration tools that should make SOME of the transition a little easier. But as you alluded to, there are endless little snags you tend to run into along the way, and it doesn't help that this isn't even a "pure" install of vB 3.8 - it's been upgraded like 10 times starting with 2.1 (I think), so there's all sorts of shitty code lying around that could cause issues along the way.

In the end, it's entirely possible that Kyle will choose to just migrate to a new server and keep vB 3.8 as is. It's old, and it's shitty, but in theory just getting onto a new box that keeps the db on an SSD would take care of most of our issues, so if that's the easy path forward compared to starting from scratch on new software, it is what it is.

For the curious, our first version was vBulletin 1.1.4. ROFL

https://web.archive.org/web/20010223...m/BB/index.php

As DaFace already touched on... it's just not possible to simply migrate user names and info to a new platform. You guys underestimate what an incredibly complex undertaking something like that is. Since we're running a very old version of vBulletin, it's next to impossible to migrate the existing database to something newer without destroying who knows what and introducing countless new errors that users would then bitch constantly about.

This is just not an easy fix at all without trashing/changing most of what makes CP what it currently is.

If we just set up a new server from scratch, Xenforo or whatever, and had a cutover day where everybody is redirected to that new setup, isn't that enough? We could keep the old vBulletin 3.8 thing up under a different URL, and reference it as needed, but lock out all new posts. The old DB would stop growing, and the new server would be all new tech stack whatever and hopefully buy another 30 years. Maybe this has been proposed and shot down. I realize even this is still a project, but seems like one that is about as lightweight as could be hoped for.

That's a valid point regarding performance, though. For my work, we deal with billions of rows of data, and in order to free up some bandwidth on the server (deal with a Greenplum database currently), older data and tables are consistently deleted.

Not sure what infrastructure is supported on the back end (again, not claiming to be an IT expert I just happen to have to be aware of a lot of the back end stuff as part of my work), but may likely either just need to enhance the current state to keep everything. If not, deleting stuff might be the way to go.

Even if there is some form of migration on older software, you're still looking at hours which can turn to days/weeks of perfecting the migration with regards to getting everything up and running just by the sheer nature of the activity of migration. The timeline would be (understandably) pro-longed since this forum is maintained by people as a hobby.

Which is why I don't get scho's bitching at all.

No one said it would be easy. I don't expect someone to sacrifice their job for a side hustle/hobby.

I think the bigger issue is what stays and what goes during any migration.

Maybe Kyle can put it to a vote - he can propose a few things.

Examples
A. Keep everything the same - no cost
B. Keep everything and migrate to a superior system. Cost 20K and 2 months
C. Toss certain things and delete other very old stuff. Cost 10k and 1 month

With 1 million tables, there are a massive amount of old threads and data that may have little to no replies. Shit can them.

Photos: massive amounts and establish a cut off for them. Maybe no photos older than 5 years.

It's not really bitching about the downtime as much as all the time spent bitching about the down time and no clear path after years.

Maybe Kyle can just say, **** it. It is was it is, so deal with it. I got no problem with that.

He can ask for volunteers or donations or show a plan so we can all help.

I'm not sure what he wants to make out of a new site. Building a complete site from scratch? Plugging some holes? Redevelop current site?

CP members are nothing short of shocking when it comes to pitching in. Just ask and maybe he might be surprised at all the help he gets.

@DaFace.... I haven't been in the backend of VBull in over a decade but if I recall correctly it defaults to storing all the attachments, avatars, etc in the DB. OK to do on small sites but not large ones like this.

I know the new version allows to change it to filesystem but not sure if the 3.x does.

Filesystem vs DB will be much faster and less load on the server. Could be a big reason the DB backups bring the server to a halt.

Yes, it's a viable solution. We're starting to hit at the crux of the issue, though. In a sense, this is an engineering problem. We (and by we, I really just mean Kyle since the rest of us are just spitballing) are trying to optimize for a combination of:

-Short-term reliability
-Long-term maintenance requirements
-Ingrained user experience
-Possibilities for new features
-Discussion history
-Cost
-And probably a half-dozen other things

Tons of potential solutions, all that come with their own pros and cons.

I like this format. I have seen others. Like Orange mange.....it sucked.

A million rows is nothing...Especially if it's just a couple text columns. To me this sounds like some sort of hardware catastrophe that's befallen ChiefsPlanet.

It's a reasonable question, but we've had attachments stored in the filesystem for a decade or so.

It's old software that requires old php and mysql. Throwing more horsepower at it is not going to get that much ROI.

If it was modern code and SQL I would be in more agreement with the hardware being part of the solution.

Again, it's just frustrating when people say stuff like this without knowing what you're talking about. A million rows (technically 16 million at the moment) is no problem...for an enterprise-level server cluster with a team of database administrators maintaining it.

We have one box that's realistically not much faster than a computer you could buy today at Best Buy that's largely maintained by one guy in his free time. Oh, and it's running on software that isn't even supported anymore.

It's like saying, "Well, any old PC can do 4K video editing these days" and pretending like it shouldn't be an issue for someone trying to do it on an Intel Celeron PC running Windows XP.

Don't get me wrong - new hardware will help, especially storing the database on SSDs. But it's just another bandaid, and if we keep running this old software, we'll almost certainly be due for yet another hardware upgrade in a few years, while modern software could set us up to handle additional growth much more effectively.

I've wanted to upgrade software for years, but a hardware migration takes 10% of the work that a software migration does (and still is a ton of work). Thus, the ~5-year cycle of new server upgrade that works well for a bit and then eventually runs into more issues.

So at the end of the day, it sounds like the antiquated software is the major roadblock.

Maybe the best solution is to start a brand new ChiefsPlanet with new software, lock ALL old threads from any new postings and signups, keep the site up for viewing and ads to generate income with a link on the new site, make everyone signup on the new site with their old user names, and then there is NO migration.

All you need is a new server.

Seems much faster, no migration of all the old stuff except user data.

Am I missing something? :hmmm:

Maybe we can all pool $100 together to wager on fanduel in hopes of getting a new server? I bet we can be there by Superbowl Sunday.