I was at Jen's house for four days for a little very needed R&R. On Tuesday morning around 9 I got a text message that the forum was acting weird. I got online and saw the problem with the topics and called the host company to let them know. I called about an hour later to check on the progress of the fix. When they asked me what my trouble ticket number was I opened my email and I found an email from them from 6 that morning:
I am writing to let you know that we have moved your db to a new server. Your site was alarming in our monitoring system and it took us a while to find where the database was. It looks like you had a move of your database recently that was never finished. I have finished this move for you and your db is now on xxx.xxx.com and the site is working as it should be. If you have any problems with the new db please let us know. thank you
well, obviously, the site was not "working as it should be." They had done the move, but only checked to see if the forum looked ok, they didn't actually test it past that. I had to walk the person though the steps to actually see the error. He said he would look into it. I called an hour later to check on the status - they still hadn't figured out what the problem was. 30 minutes later I called again, and again they didn't know. I told them to put the database back the way it was that morning, and they said they'd call when it was done. they called me back and told me that it would be a $50 restore fee. I explained that it was their fault that it broke, so we wouldn't be paying anything. An hour later they called me again and told me that it was ready to be done, but needed my authorization for a different $30 fee. I again told them that it wasn't my error and I wouln't be paying anything.
They restored the database from an old version, pre-database-split, so we lost a pile of posts. then they called to tell me it was done, but that we were on the old server so the site wasn't going to be stable. I hadn't planned to go to this version of the site for at least a month because I wasn't going to have time to learn it, etc, before then. I told them to let it limp along and to ignore the alarms.
However, I firmly believe in "warnings" and even though we were back up and running, I didn't trust that the whole adventure wasn't a clear message that not upgrading was going to be a very very bad thing... so I decided to just do it.
Jen and I got home around 5:00 and I called the company to tell them to do a full database backup so that I could start the upgrade. they told me that they would get to it as soon as they could. An hour later - no backup. I shut the forum down. another hour - no backup. They promised it for 7:30. At 8:30, still no backup. I decided to purchase the new database and wing it. 9:30 I call to bitch, and they said the backup was completed at 8:50 and I should have gotten an email (no email existed.) So, now it's time to do it...
I upload the files and start the conversion process at about 10:00... mind you, I'm sitting in Jen's living room all this time... Things are going fine, then they crash. I call the company and tell them. They tell me that they'll get to it when they can, and I tell them to call me back. He sounds a little confused by that request, as it is almost midnight. They called at 1 to tell me that they had changed some settings and I should be good to go. I thought I was,and then we crashed again. I started over but at 2:30 I finally gave up on it and went to bed. I was up at 7:30 on Wednesday to try to get it going again. At 11:00 Jen "pleasantly" requested that I get off of the computer (lol) and we went out. We got back a few hours later and I took a deep breath and made the forum active. I spent another two hours hammering stuff out, then headed home about 4:15, leaving Jen and Debby to run the administration for the night.
Note that none of the staff had ever used the new forum before, and I had only used it on the phpBB Community a handful of times.
We've been winging it ever since. Jen, Debby, Liz and Jenn have been very patient with trying to figure things out for themselves and fielding as many of your questions as possible. Fryed_1 and Pit$Pull both came out of nowhere and stepped up to help us out as well, and without both of them your current forum experience would be quite a bit different.
As always, I couldn't have done this without all of the people who give up a lot of time to help keep this place running. All of you members deserve a lot of credit as well for sticking with us!
And as a final note, the host company called me to ask why I had THREE databases, when I only had two on my account. I told them I had no idea... I only knew of two and really only needed one. Evidently there was an extra copy of our database on the same server and it was named the exact same as the one that we were using, which really shouldn't happen. I told them to dump both the mystery one and the one from the old forum. I gave them a brief overview of the past few days, and they even refunded the money from the new database, yay!
So... that's the story... I'm not telling you all of it because I want a medal but I hope you'll understand why I have been a little short with people over the past few days and why the staff has been extra protective of me.
Thanks everyone! I couldn't do it without you!
Love ya! Mean it!