RadioRob

A quick update… our nightly backups are still running. As a precaution, I’m going to wait until the backup completes before taking the site offline and moving data. I expect this should complete somewhere around 1:30-2:00 am. Once it finishes, I’ll take the boards offline and begin the migration.

Passwords are stored locally on your computer, so it should still be remembered. The reason it was not remembered before was because the domain name itself changed.

Our new permanent home is ready and I'll be migrating this site and the review archive later tonight sometime after 12:01 AM Eastern. During that migration process, I will need to disable the forums in order to prevent posts that are made during the migration from being lost. (I will need to export all of the data, and if you're busy adding more content, anything new from the moment I start the export will not make it over to our new home.) There is nothing that you need to do once the forums are locked. Once the migration is complete, I'll update DNS to point users to the new server and unlock the boards on that new server. So you'll know you've reached the new location when you see the forums online again.

As posted in New Forum Organization thread, I have completed the reorganization of the forums. I hope this change will help make it a little easier to navigate the site!

As posted in New Forum Organization thread, I have completed the reorganization of the forums. I hope this change will help make it a little easier to navigate the site!

Update complete.

Update complete.

Update: 5/6/21 I plan to start reorganizing/creating new forums tomorrow. Based on popular request, I'll leave Opera as just itself. (I thought about calling it "Not Until the Fat Lady Sings", but I thought might be pushing it.)

It's possible it's a Xenforo defense mechanism being triggered by server load. The server is under a heavy load while I run repairs on the database tables in the background. That's why the website has been sluggish most of the morning. I'm batching the requests so they're throttled, that way I don't have to do a longer "big" full outage, but it means while the task is running... the website is fighting the databases for available CPU/memory.

Most regular maintenance will happen in the background transparently. My challenge if I set a dedicated window is that I can’t do anything until then. This can delay getting the things needed to stabilize the site. Eventually I’ll need a few one-time windows to actually move the site so we don’t have people posting while data is copying and then get missed. But that would not be a regularly scheduled thing.

From looking at activity on the site, this looks to have started around 11PM Eastern and ran for just a little over an hour. Being able to view the site looks to have been restored around midnight and write access around 12:15ish.

The problems that occurred over the last few hours are my fault and I apologize to the community. As I've noted earlier, in order to recover the site quickly when Daddy's server failed... I migrated the site to my personal server. I'm in the process of preparing the site to move to it's permanent home. In order to make sure things transferred correctly, I had to export a copy of everything into the equivalent of a big ZIP file. Because this site is so big, it takes a LONG time to generate. (It takes about 5 hours to export the database and then compress it into a ZIP file.) While this process was occurring, I went out with friends to dinner since it was going to take a while to complete. While I was gone, the server ran out of disk space. As a result, the server could not read/write from the database. I fixed the issue as soon as I got home. I've also fixed a few mySQL database tables that crashed as a result of not having sufficient space. So long story short... my bad. This one was on me. Sorry for the problem.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm running the site on my personal server. Since I was trying to convert some processes, the server ran out of space. This caused the problem earlier. Sorry about that.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm running the site on my personal server. Since I was trying to convert some processes, the server ran out of space. This caused the problem earlier. Sorry about that.

At this time, there is no plan to remove the Cabana. In the PAST, it was granted to people who had contributed to the financial stability of the site. Going forward, I don’t see it being associated to a financial requirement, but instead to regular contributors. In the SHORT TERM, there is no plan to make changes to permissions. This exercise is simplest to reorganize the forums. If folks have contributed to the forums in the past that do not have access to the Cabana or someone feels they have been an active contributor and feels excluded, PM me and I’ll manually adjust your permissions.

I’ve changed the question mark to the verbose emoji.

I've made some changes based on feedback given. Updated 5/5: Announcements Site News * [*]General Discussion The Lounge The Cabana [*]Daddy's Den The Deli The Spa Ask A Provider Male Strip-Clubs Fetish Forum [*]Media and Entertainment Political Issues Movies TV and Streaming Services Music Lincoln Center (Opera) * [*]Live Theater and Broadway [*]The Gallery [*]The Sports Desk [*]Literature [*]Destinations Traveling Providers Traveling Members The Americas ** Europe Africa/Asia/Australia Street Scenes [*]Back Office Tech Talk Features and Feedback * * New forum to be created. ** Expanded from South America to all North/South America travel outside of the US

The archives are staying as-is. I don’t have any plans to add/remove reviews to it. I am personally interested in setting up a brand new review site later. My goal would be to build/develop it such a way as to reduce risk as much as possible. This includes being located outside of the US, masking the hosting company through the use of a non-US CDN/proxy, etc. There are still lots of things to still figure out but by no means is it something I see doing super quickly. To be honest, there are more capabilities I would like to do around the community site first.

A decision regarding the future of the Cabana is not going to be made as part of this change. The original goal was simply to reorganize what is already here. The scope appears to be slightly changing in that a few forum or two might make their way out there... but right now I don't foresee making a decision to remove something already established right now. (I'm intentionally shying away from anything destructive given that we don't officially have control of the site yet. Again, it's highly unlikely to matter, but instead I'm taking a minor precaution.)

I have a long term strategy planned for the Gallery. Long-term the gallery will be pulled out of the forum into something tied to it, but not a forum itself. So for now I'd like to leave this alone until I can implement it.

I've been involved with development for nearly 20 years. It's funny... many of the objections are due to being being familiar/comfortable with the way it is, even if it's not the best way to do something. A few (like 10) years ago, we had a website that launched version 3. We had several people that complained about how horrible the changes were and wanted us to go back to version 2. Ultimately we stood our ground on the change and life went on. It was around 5 years later we introduced version 4 of the site. The same people complained about how they wanted the to go back to version 3 and that it was so perfect/great. We literally went back and found their same people posting how they wanted version 3 back that a few years ago thought it was horrible.

I can set something up for the short term. Hopefully it's not actively being used though.

Per Daddy's instructions posted at: https://www.companyofmen.org/help/donate/ If you've manually donated, PM me and I'll add you to the forum.

It's still there. Everything that exists today is still going to be there. I'm just going to be reordering/regrouping the forums. (I'm creating a new announcements forum as well in an effort to need to pin threads in The Lounge like we traditionally have had to do. General Discussion Political Issues Comedy & Tragedy The Sports Desk Tech Talk

An example of some of the topics in the semi-private conversation area include what I posted regarding estimated operating costs for the website... some updates on finding out the status on Daddy (before we found out the bad news), etc. It's things that might be somewhat more sensitive in nature and not something we want being able to be picked up by Google or by a bot creating an account.