The forum is back!

[scott]

Hi All,

Sorry for the service disruption but my hosting provider stopped supporting PHP 5.2 and is forcing everyone to upgrade to PHP 7.3 for all shared hosting services. This is true across the industry. This completely breaks the old forum in many ways. To stay on the old PHP version would bump the hosting cost from $10/month (shared hosting) to $80/month or more (virtual private server). Note: I also pay $70/year for an offsite backup solution.

In order to stay on shared hosting, I have installed a brand new version of phpBB3 and imported all of the posts and attachments from the old forum database. You will need to delete all besslerwheel.com cookies from your browser in order to login to the new forum.

If your old password does not work it is possible it did not migrate properly. Just request a new one with the password reset option.

We lost a lot of bells and whistles because the old forum was so heavily customized (reputations, blogs, wiki, etc.), but at least the users, posts, and attachments are preserved.

It is very bare bones for now but I can extend and customize the new forum over time.

Best,
Scott

[MrTim]

Thank you, Scott!

Testing, testing...

I guess I'm the first one back. (Okay, the second one back. And the 'edit' function works. ;-)
Nice to see BW back up. I'm sure I'm not the only one who went through withdrawal. ;-)

Now, time to round up the usual suspects... ;-)

[scott]

Testing, testing...

It works! Yes thanks for rounding up the usual suspects.

[ovyyus]

It's working, but it feels like another planet. Well done Scott!

[scott]

lol yep we are living in the future now I guess :-)

[scott]

I need to figure how to stop the signatures from appearing on every post, so noisy

[scott]

Those are the types of small updates I made to the old forum that were just not feasible to migrate to the new version

[Fletcher]

Thanks a bunch Scott. Take a break, the nice-to-haves can come later.

Old dogs, new tricks - I'll get used to it :7)

[gravitationallychallenged]

Thank you Scott for a job well done! For he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fellow for he's a jolly good fe e loooowwww, which nobody can deny!

I propose that a donation be required to access The Community Buzz. Scott has born the costs and burden of this website for many years and I think he should be compensated for it, especially considering this recent headache he had to endure. Requiring a donation would also provide a measure of security, perhaps preventing spammers or other less than honorable people from accessing our most valuable, sensitive, information free of charge.

[unstable]

Scott, thank you for your nice work. I like this new version of phpbb

[Oystein]

This is great!! (applaud) Thank you for the hard/frustrating work.

But I guess it felt equally good when you finally got it working again..

Best
ØR

[John Collins]

It feels good to be back, but so different, but I don’t like it….I love it!

JC

[Oystein]

I agree! And as Scott said, now it also works perfekt on a smartphone screen.

ØR

[agor95]

Good to see you back and running.

There is always a push too move people onto new versions.

I installed this version at the start of the year.

Watch out for auto-registering scripts.
They create around ten new users in a batch and then do nothing.

All the Best

[Zhyyra]

Great stuff! Glad to see the forum up and running again.

Zhy