2010-10-29 - Update on downtime, vulnerabilities etc.

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dimopoulos

Crazy Greek
Staff member
Ladies,

I have opened this forum so as to communicate regularly with you on technology issues pertaining to our community.

We can all agree that the upgrade backfired - badly. I have personally spent days tweaking and fixing things and still it seemed that everything was not the way it was supposed to.

We waited nearly a full version prior to upgrading to vBulletin 4.0. Unfortunately all the nice little things that the new version has came with a price. That price was your retinas (remember all that white when we first opened the new forum?), huge delays on the server, incompatibilities with Internet Explorer to name some.

So we are moving towards a new path. We are going to downgrade the forum to the v.3.8 (with some security patches) and that will be the end of it. I do not think we will upgrade any more, unless the new version has something we really need.

This last week we have brought in a consultant to work on the web servers. Both servers were upgraded to new software, optimized for our hardware and our forum. Up until last night everything was working fine. However, once we enabled one of the features that would definitely bring the load times even lower, we discovered that there was a problem.

There is an area in the forum that uses AJAX not securely. This area will publish to the cache of the web server, cookies from another user. That in effect does the following:

User logs in (dimopoulos)
Navigation to one page (user becomes randomly someone else - say DLewis)
More navigation (user now is SparklingFlame)
etc.

Some of you have noticed this and created tickets and even tweeted about it. Thanks for that! I was in the middle of more changes so I was not aware of this.

The problem was contained by us removing the caching mechanism. We are not going to get the site any faster through that route until we downgrade a version.

Once again, thank you for your patience. It sure has been a hell of a month for all of us.
 
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I just want to say thank you for all your hard work! And thank you for listening to the concerns of the community!

will we still be able to keep the mentions in the 3.8 version? I do like that feature
 
I just want to say thank you for all your hard work! And thank you for listening to the concerns of the community!

will we still be able to keep the mentions in the 3.8 version? I do like that feature

As far as I know there is a 'mentions' v 3.8. I haven't seen the database structure for that version but I presume that it will be the same.

There will have to be some data manipulation for the downgrade. I know for sure that I will have a horrible time converting all the attachments back to the previous version. If the mentions/thanks will need to be modified for the 3.8 version, that is what I will do. :)
 
Hi dimopoulos, Just wanted to let you know that right before the system was shut down last night, at about 10:35 EST, my screen changed to another color and I became logged in as another user (~Sparklingflame~), and then, the color changed again, and I was signed in as yet, another user, (I forget the name), just wanted to enlighten you on that fact. Nikos, what would be the possibilities of going back to the original format, how it was right before the change, that worked just fine!
 
dimopoulos, Okey Dokey, So that is the "Old Version", Great! Thank You for trying something that you thought would be better for us, We really appreciate it!
 
dimopoulos, Did we actually have the change yet?, cause it is still extremely slow, to the point where, I don't want to go into a thread or turn a page, in fear of getting stuck!
 
dimopoulos, Did we actually have the change yet?, cause it is still extremely slow, to the point where, I don't want to go into a thread or turn a page, in fear of getting stuck!

Hey Leesh,

No we have not reverted the forum back to the old version. This will happen this weekend.

I am really baffled by this - we make some changes everything is fine, people are happy with the speed, then all of a sudden it is slow. Really weird (and the logs don't reveal much).
 
dimopoulos,

I read this in the other thread:

...
Solution
We have decided to take more drastic steps. The forum will be closed for extensive maintenance the first week of November. We expect the forum to be closed Friday November 05 and will open again on Monday or Tuesday. There will be a page outlining the progress made and the expected time that the forum will be up and running.

What are we going to do
The forum will be reverted back to the version 3.8....

Are the forums still going to be reverted back to the old format this weekend? I'm really looking forward to the forums looking the way they used to including being able to search our Thanked posts and customize our profiles.
 
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