Site Update - Recent Outages

[Frank Hagan]

The software the forums use is "end of life" on Dec. 31, 2026, and to be honest, the company has been mainly ignoring it for the last couple of years. My "lifetime purchase" with semi-annual maintenance payments was back in 2011, turned out to be 15 years, 8 months and 12 days (not counting today). So I guess I can't be too mad at them.

 

What irritates me is they marked the software as unlicensed with the latest update release, even though I have paid through the end of the year. Their goal is to get me to pay them more for the new version, $200 a year instead of the $110 I have been paying. Or go to their cloud hosted software at $149 a month. Yeah, not going to do that. Their support sucks. 

 

What happened:

The "unlicensed software" issue caused the software to hammer a database, slowing down the VPS I lease to run the software on. The server company then "throttled" the databases, making the server less responsive. When it was responding slower than the software likes, the forums would go offline. And, during this time I was on a cruise with my wife in Alaska after a year being grounded by my doctors due to my head first exploding (hemorrhagic stroke, but caught in time) and then the management of that (pumping me full of clotting factor to keep my head from exploding more), causing a CVST (clot in the cerebral sinus veins in the head), which was also caught early. So no harm, no foul, and I was lucky and am mostly fully recovered. 

 

I am kicking everyone else off the VPS to eliminate resource competition and trying to get things stabilized. 

 

Because of health issues, I will be converting the forums and then handing off management to someone who can better maintain things. I don't want to get to the point where the forums are just simply abandoned, and I have probably another five good years of travel stuff we want to do. So there are things in the works to keep this place alive for the community. 

[Andy B]

Thank you, Frank, for all your work here!