Seems a lot faster to me but maybe that's because far fewer people are using it than normal.

Well... that was... disconcerting!

Guess it's put away the idea that the forums are closing early next year.
Why go to the bother and expense of a big revamp if they're going to close?

Think this is not the final thing that is happening, We supposed to have a place that we can posts images and video so there be more downtime to come.

No, it's not. It's still down. I wish they'd sort it out.

Perhaps something went wrong and they rolled back to the old system ? Why have 3 days downtime just to allow copying the data, surely that could be done from a backup?

It's difficult to copy a group of files that's being constantly written to. Back-up copies do not sit on a shelf 'just in case', they are redundant systems that run in tandem.

I can't login in Chrome, even after clearing cookies so I'm having to use "edge". I think this has happened before and usually clears later.

I suspect the upgrade hit a problem so we got restored to how it was prior to the upgrade.

I don't think so. By the sounds of it they have done a sort of compatibility test. The soon-to-be old database will have a different structure to the new database, using different names for the variables and such. I suspect that they've written some PHP to automatically translate the content from one DB to the other, and they've then done a trial run on a limited subset of data, then carefully verified that everything works as expected and fixed any bugs. They didn't have to restore anything because they didn't actually affect the current forum, aside from switching it to read-only, then back again.

An educated guess on my part.

If they were doing that they could have taken a copy of the DB and done it all offline surely? They implied that the 72 hours was for the upgrade.

I suspect that the current site is a mess of code. It'll be like wrestling spaghetti.

[Edit] Bit in bold; not quite, have another read. They said, "We will be initiating work to upgrade the forums to a new platform soon. [...] The forums will be going in read-only mode for up to 72 hours when we commence migration of all your threads, posts, messages and accounts." Basically, they are trying to copy the database, but they're translating it at the same time, minus the mess.

As I say, I'm only guessing.

Exactly what I thought. You can take a recent backup and use that as the basis for testing the migration. They either hit an insurmountable error or the transfer was going to take a very long time.

Usually in a migration of this size you'd transfer everything up to a particular date first, then just incrementally play catchup until you're ready to switch over.

To be fair I haven't played with PHP / MySQL much other than installing a simplemachines forum and phpbb years back. The forum software they use is fairly standard off the shelf, but the scale is huge and there are probably a lot more custom elements php additions.

If were me I'd use the AWS Database Migration Service as the forum is already hosted on AWS and there are loads of big data DB options and elastic search options to made it more scalable and solve the forum search issues. They would still have a lot of schema migration and changes though.

To clarify, we always intended to do this in a few stages. The first stage was to see how long a data scrape of this magnitude would take. This was done offline with a fairly recent, but older backup.

The second was the purpose of the read-only: to see if everything from our 9-year-old version of vBulletin will transfer correctly to our new platform and system. As we said in the announcement, based on the length it time it took to download and upload the old backup, we anticipated this being 72 hours. This ended up being accurate, though we quickly noticed a few items not being transferred properly due to incompatibility. We think we have identified fixes for those objects and we are now sitting on a fresh data dump which should mean the next time (which we are anticipating to be early next year) will only need to be the difference between last Wednesday and the day we make forums read-only again. We're hoping this means we can reduce further down time even more, but we will see how testing of the fixes vs. compatibility goes first.

I am looking forward to seeing the results when we see the new forum. I know a lot of people will moan until they get used to it, but I think it'll be better in the longer term to have more up to date software and features.

All of your hard work is appreciated by a lot of the members I'm sure.

Thank you.

Oh and I just worked out why I couldn't log in from Chrome and a good tip for other users, you cannot tick the box to block third-party cookies because DS uses a domain dsid for login but sets a cookie under a different domain, or different domain to the visited site in the URL (one of the two).

I have temporarily unchecked it, then logged in and then re-ticked "block third-party cookies", now that cookie is set I should remain logged in. Thank goodness as Edge sucks!

The power of starting a thread.

Makes you tingle, huh?

Well I have to say it makes a change, generally the only time DS responds to a post/thread of mine is to tell me I'm banned.

But I've been really good for a while,----honest.

my mind boggles, sounds like they had do download the data from the cloud and then re-upload it ? Not like my day when companies had tapes and servers and real techies to hand

If only there was a pinned announcement explaining it all.

Early morning anecdotage: faster than i ever remember

Thank you. I'd rather have a slow but steady migration to the new software that may mean we have to wait a few more weeks or months. Than a rushed change with a complete new look that totally ruined the new site and caused it to either be completely unusable or drive members away.

Let's be honest, the current version of DS is limping along but apart from the annoying niggle works for the majority of members (with the odd work around for others like me) I'd prefer to wait a few more months than to turn on today and find an unusable mess which wouldn't / couldn't be fixed.

An excellent way to slow down loading times for certain threads, especially on older/low spec devices. I'm quite happy for these images/videos to open in a new window via a link, but maybe I'm old school. For example, some of the music threads are full of YouTube links.

And the like/dislike feature may be abused by some forum cliques. Time will tell.