Posted on

Update on Gingerbeer

(click on the title of this post to go to the post page and see the comments)

Hi all,

It’s taken me a while to get this up and running for a variety of reasons but here it is.  This site is open to anyone to sign up and post (first post requires approval) and create new pages so you can at least continue conversations here in the meantime.

So, the update.  The company that Gingerbeer was hosted with sent me an email at the end of September saying that on the 31st Oct the site would be deleted as they are no longer serving out type of server.  I missed this email as I was out of town and they did not send any further emails or notifications.  It was several days before someone contacted me to say the site was down.  I called the company the next morning to find out that not only was the site deleted but the entire server wiped clean including all of the site back ups.  I had been making local back up copies intermittently however in June my desktop computer crashed.  I rebuilt it but have been having problems with the user accounts so I couldn’t reconfigure the backups as my move a few weeks later took up all of my time and attention.  It is likely therefore that the most up to date backup I have of the site is from June at the latest and anything that was posted on the site between then and when it went down is gone.  That is the best case scenario.  Most of the posts are actually stored in the ‘database’ and I’m not sure how often I backed up the database locally.  The whole point of having a Cloud server is that it keeps a back-up stored remotely for you.

Essentially this means that the site needs to be rebuilt and an old back-up restored.  However, as I haven’t had tech support for the site for several years, SMF wasn’t running the most up to date version of the software so I can’t just install the newest version of SMF and then paste Gingerbeer back into it.  The long and short of it is that this is going to take some time and a lot more effort on my part as well as the funds to pay someone to spend some time troubleshooting our site.

I can certainly do that so that we have GB back the way it was at some point in its history.  However, this may be a good time to start again on a platform that is easier for me to manage without tech support, like WordPress with a database that isn’t massive and won’t crash a cheap server platform (which is what I have here (it’s scalable so I can upgrade this package without trouble if we decide to keep the old site).

Anyway, feel free to comment and let me know what you think.  At some point, I’ll try to figure out how to put up a poll.

EVicT

Boards are live again at boards.gingerbeer.co.uk