Web-Site Issues?

[Glen]

4 minutes ago, Dtret said:

Your style leaves a lot to be desired, as we know. Contradictory is correct but you choose your rules of writing, we still love you. 😘 

Aaawwwwweeeee!!!!!

[cny first gen 71]

You guys crack me up, just another reason to love this club/family 

[jft69z]

So here's the short version.

We're setup with "Invision", which is the front end of the forum you see, and we use GoDaddy as the web hosting service.

I called GoDaddy Monday, was on the phone for 1.5 hours with a very helpful tech. They are always wonderful when I call and try to solve the problem. They confirmed what I saw, nothing sinister like malware, attacks, etc. Everything with the firewall is doing it's job. A common theme though every time I call, is that our setup is getting long in the tooth, not efficient, and we really need to do something to get it up to date with more modern protocols. 

'Invision' does not have a phone number, everything is done thru their support forums, trouble tickets, and email. I put out a request for help yesterday and they're looking to see if there are any problems on their side of things. Slow and cumbersome... Someone on the support forum answered and said I could PM him for help, and apparently other members have used his services to get things squared away. I may look into that too, at least he knows that system very well.

Last time the site went down, we started looking into alternatives to what we have now, which at this point is likened to a house built with a deck of cards, possibly a matter of time before it falls down. It would be nice to get everything under one roof instead of the two separate companies, which would help eliminate the finger pointing to each other when we have an issue. Both Invision & GoDaddy have solutions to take control of everything, but there are pros & cons to each solution. 

Invision has a package that would do everything, and maintain the basic structure of what we already have in place. They did mention the web address would be a little different (like"invision.firstgenmc.com"), which nobody seems to like that idea. Also, back to my original complaint about them, NO phone support at all. They won't even talk to you about what package is needed to service our particular needs (various options with different prices). I mean, I'm trying to spend money with them, at least they could do is talk to you about it. That really annoys me, not to mention when there's trouble, back to waiting days to get a solution. Oh, their basic package is approx $90/month, and it goes up a lot from there. Quite a lot more expensive than we pay now. Oh, and I'm not sure what package we would need, because they're not answering that for our specific needs. 

GoDaddy has solutions as well, high initial cost for them to convert what we have to their system, but possibly an entire different look and functionality. Also, there would be a steep learning curve on our part to tailor things to our liking, create pages, administration/moderation, etc. They do answer the phone when there's a problem though, which is a big plus. The yearly cost is less than Invision, after the initial fees to convert, but again, that's not the only factor to consider.

There are a couple other forum type solutions, but initial research shows them to be very pricey as well. 

I spoke to Ian the other day about this too, he'll look around when he gets done with a road trip to see if there's anything he can find. We also discussed the situations above, and he agrees, it would be nice to have everything under one roof, but as mentioned....pros & cons. 

So, there's the not so short version apparently, lol. There's still a lot of other factors I won't bore you with, but it comes down to reliability, security, ease of use for the members & admins, and cost. It's definitely not going to get better, but when do we bite the bullet?

As far as Rob needing to log-in a couple times, I had no such issues and I have 2 PC's, a laptop & phone, always online/logged in to the forum, no issues with any of them requiring me to re-login at any point. Dennis & Willie said the same thing yesterday, but that's just a few people, anyone else have that happen? I did clear the 'System Cache' the other day a few times to see if that freed up some resources (and it did), but again, none of my devices needed me to log-in after that.

So there you have it for the time being, lot of things to consider. Right now, we're not at a critical stage where our site is unusable, but we need to start thinking about the future, which will no doubt be a little painful.

Joe T 

[714024SPEED]

Ohh boy. Thanks for all you guys do to keep the website up and running. I could never do it . My knowledge is so limited with this stuff .....it scares me.

[willie]

I also repeat what Kevin said, Thank You Officers for all you do, and especially the time you donate!!!

[jft69z]

31 minutes ago, 714024SPEED said:

 .....it scares me.

It scares me too Kevin...more than you can imagine...

[Marks71]

Let us know if you have to make any changes that require a substantial one time up front fee to get things right Joe. I’ll be willing to pledge $200 towards that fee for the club.

[jft69z]

1 hour ago, Marks71 said:

Let us know if you have to make any changes that require a substantial one time up front fee to get things right Joe. I’ll be willing to pledge $200 towards that fee for the club.

That's pretty awesome Mark, thank you!

[Dtret]

2 hours ago, Marks71 said:

Let us know if you have to make any changes that require a substantial one time up front fee to get things right Joe. I’ll be willing to pledge $200 towards that fee for the club.

Wow. That’s pretty awesome. Thank you. 

[72 Monte Carlo]

I already talked with Joe and we both agree that Invision not having a phone number and immediate tech support is a huge negative for forum hosting issues, and the stress of not knowing how long the forums would be offline doesn't help anybody out much.

The main problem that I see with forum hosting software in today's world, is that most of them are corporate based and ran - i.e., Invision, Internet Brands, etc., and they seem to lack having immediate tech support to resolve forum issues in a timely manner. 

The forum software that I've built other forums on is Vbulletin a "php" based software, which is a robust forum platform with lots of nice features. The main thing that I like about it, is that it's hosted on GoDaddy just like FGMCC is, but I can call GoDaddy directly and have them look for any hosting issues with the forums or the website since it's all hosted with them. This means that we manage the website and the forum hosting ourselves within our GoDaddy hosting platform, which means if anything does arise, we can resolve the issue as soon as humanly possible ourselves. If I do have a question about adding an addon needed, I just login to the vbulletin site/forums and look for the information needed.

 

XenForo is another forum platform which is php based as well, that seems to be a good one too, with lots of features and options in its software suite, but at much higher costs for the added features and functionality that we might want/need. 

I'm texting Joe with more data to help us gauge which direction we want to go, to ensure that our forum community is up to date, more robust, has all the features and functionality we all want, without driving up membership dues cost. 

 

 

 

[72 Monte Carlo]

Thank you Mark for your generosity! 

[DragCat]

And I finally remember my NEW PASSWORD without having to look at the post it note 🤣

[DragCat]

8 hours ago, Marks71 said:

Let us know if you have to make any changes that require a substantial one time up front fee to get things right Joe. I’ll be willing to pledge $200 towards that fee for the club.

I'll match Marks offer Lord knows ive benifited more than that from the knowledge that has been shared with me 🤘

[Dtret]

Thanks Mark T. But I believe the hope is none of that will be necessary, but we won’t know until we ( I say we but I really mean Joe) really start researching other formats. I know nothing about this stuff as 99 percent of my activity is phone.

[DragCat]

41 minutes ago, Dtret said:

Thanks Mark T. But I believe the hope is none of that will be necessary, but we won’t know until we ( I say we but I really mean Joe) really start researching other formats. I know nothing about this stuff as 99 percent of my activity is phone.

Understood, just throwing it out there. There is so much behind the scene stuff members do around her to keep this ship running and I'm so appreciative 

[Dtret]

10 hours ago, DragCat said:

Understood, just throwing it out there. There is so much behind the scene stuff members do around her to keep this ship running and I'm so appreciative 

We thank you ( when I say we I mean Joe, lol). 

[jft69z]

Small update.

I'm working with someone from the Invision Community that specializes in these sites. So far, he's identified a number of things that could affect resources and bad traffic (bots) that can hit the site. He's looking at both the Invision and GoDaddy platforms.

One issue on the Invision site that's causing a bunch of system codes is our very own 'Chat Box' feature. For the time being, I'm going to disable it, and we'll monitor the log files to see if that's still occurring.

[Moestuin]

• Hi, I am Moestuin. 

The Gardener that waters the servers and cultivates better speeds. Maintaining a few Invision Community forums myself and assisting other forum admins.
Please let us know in this topic the exact times when slowness occurs or when site is not reachable. That will help me pinpoint the cause in the logfiles better.
I have already blocked a lot of bots and bad crawlers. Will continue to monitor.

22 hours ago, jft69z said:

I'm going to disable it, and we'll monitor the log files to see if that's still occurring.

Now it is disabled, there are no new errors.

Next Thursday in the early hours, at around 5am i will preform some maintenance to the database. During that time the website could be down. I will be making sure the website is back up and running before 7am.

[jft69z]

Just a quick note... I'd like to welcome Roland (Moestuin) to our group. He's the gentleman from the Invision community I mentioned earlier. He's been working hard the last number of days to correct & modify some things in the background to help make our site more efficient & safe. So far, I'm very impressed with what he has done, and continues to do for us.

As mentioned, he's going to correct a database issue we've had for a number of years, and one that would prevent us from migrating to the newest version of Invision in the future. He also says it will likely speed things up as well. 

Thank you again Roland, we all appreciate what you're doing for our group!

[Dtret]

Yes. Thank you Roland.