dBoard 2.0 Release Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning at 9 AM (Saturday, May 13, 2006, 9 AM Eastern Time US) I will be taking the board down for the release of dBoard 2.0. It should take less than an hour, and probably only around 15 minutes. In any case, I will bring the board back up as quickly as possible.Thanks, everyone, for all the testing help. A lot of minor bugs were found and fixed. There should still be some shaking out of bugs over the few days after the release, but by and large the indications look good for a quality release.

Board going down in 2 minutes!

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Welcome to dBoard 2.0 everyone!The upgrade took 24 hours instead of 15 minutes because of a bug combined with the board's popularity. When I upgraded a test version of the board there was no one trying to access it. When I upgraded the main board, everybody was trying to access it. The bug caused every access to start up a Perl process which never completed because it was looking for data tables that didn't exist yet. This wouldn't be a problem if there were only a few hundred accesses, but before the upgrade was complete there were a few thousand, and it brought the server to its knees.Of course, we didn't know this was the reason the server was dying, so we kept rebooting it, and the same thing kept happening. Being indexed by Google is not always a good thing!A good night's sleep and the problem became obvious, but in the meantime the webhosting company noticed all the reboots, ran a hardware diagnostic that revealed a bad component, so they replaced the motherboard. As soon as they were done I uploaded a fix for the bug, upgraded the board, and we were back in business.Well, almost. When they upgraded the motherboard they set the date to April 2, 2003 (see Nwr's previous post). I couldn't log in because the software was setting the login cookie to expire one year after April 2, 2003, which is April 2, 2004, a year ago. Setting a cookie to expire in the past is how you delete a cookie. So in other words, no login cookies were being set, and no one could log in.But after setting the date and time correctly things were all hunky dory, and we're back in business. Welcome back, everyone!

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Wait'll you have to carry out any administrative duties. The main differences are associated with member management. All board data except threads and messages is now in a MySQL database, and this permitted a number of new features.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Funny you should ask. The reason is primarily that I'm just one guy. That's one reason I keep asking likely prospects if they'd be willing to help out with coding. Great learning opportunity!dBoard 1.0 replaced UBB software from Infopop with my own software.dBoard 2.0 put all data except threads and messages in a MySQL database.dBoard 3.0 will put threads and messages into the MySQL database.It was about 16 months between the 1.0 and 2.0 releases. To have tried to move all data into the MySQL database in a single release would have stretched the release out another 6 months at least.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

One significant new feature of dBoard 2.0 is a significantly improved Member List page. It's worth checking out.As before there is the alphabet. Click on a letter to list all the members whose names begin with that letter. This displays the first page of these members, but now instead of guessing which page to click on to find the right name there's a browse table that provides a range of names to click on, completely removing the guesswork.You can click on many of the table headings to list members according to that heading. This includes listing members:

• Alphabetically by member name.
• Hierarchically by status, where Director is at the top and Junior Member is at the bottom.
• Numerically by number of posts.
• Alphabetically by location.
• Alphabetically by interests.
• In reverse chronological order by registration date.
• Alphabetically who are suspended.

You can also search by member name, location and interests. Wildcards are permitted in the search strings using the "*" (asterisk) character. The "^" (uptick) character represents the beginning of a string, while "$" (dollar sign) represents the end of a string.For those unfamiliar with this kind of searching (Google certainly doesn't have it), here's an example. When searching by member name, the search string "an" will find Alan, Barbarian and Stranger.If you place an uptick at the beginning of the string to make it "^an" then it will find names that begin with "an", like Andrew, AndyA and Anthony.If you place a dollar sign at the end of the string to make it "an$" then it will find names that end with "an", like Alan, Johanan and WiseMan.If you place an uptick at the beginning, a dollar sign at the end, and an asterisk in the middle to make it "^a*n$" then it will find all names that begin with "a" and end with "n", like Alan, Annafan and ArthurPigman.Edited by Admin, : data => date

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Anyone who had forum specific restrictions imposed before the release of dBoard 2.0 should be aware that those restrictions have been lifted. The semantic expression of these restrictions differed too greatly between 1.0 and 2.0 to maintain them accurately, and so they were not maintained across releases.This was not discussed between all moderators, only between Jar and myself because he was available via messenger at the time a decision needed to be made. We agreed that there was no one who deserved permanent forum restrictions, and so deemed it appropriate to drop existing restrictions as part of the 2.0 release.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Fear not. That's what the test subdomain is for.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

The date of birth has been added to the information on the Members page. You can enter your date of birth by going to your profile page. Birthdays are announced in the status section that appears near the top of every page.Hmmm, something about being born on March 28 in 1983 makes you a likely candidate for suspension. Can Karloskasta's suspension be far off? Click on DOB...Speaking of suspension, after clicking on DOB, hover your mouse over the suspension icon () to see more information.No surprise, Jar is our oldest member, born on the first day of the new year way back in 1886! He was in the audience at Dayton, heard at one point to be muttering, "I'll rock your ages..."

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I think we should put it in the Forum Guidelines that spammers are required to all register under the same birthday. Now that you mention it, the moderator taking the action should probably be recorded automatically. Something for the next release.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Uh, yes it is - check your profile.It's understandable that someone of your great, uh, maturity would forget his own birthday. Why don't you just go ahead and change it to something you think's about right.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

With the release of dBoard 2.0 member names became case insensitive. This means that if your member name is "Footloose" that it doesn't matter whether you type "footloose" or "FOOTLOOSE" when you log in, they'll both work.Regardless of how you log in your name will always be displayed the way it is stored in the database, but you can change this through your profile page. Simply define a new alias using the case you want.For example, let's say your member name is "footloose", but you want to change it to "Footloose". Just go to your profile page and enter "Footloose" on the Define New Alias line. Then click on Submit Modifications and the change will be made. It won't actually define a new alias, since "footloose" and "Footloose" are actually the same name, but it will replace "footloose" with "Footloose", and now your member name will be displayed everywhere as "Footloose".

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director