Science/Engineering/Technical forums

I have extensive expertise in running this board's back-end, and I'll be happy to share some of the customizations I've done at my own site and another that I administrate.

Let me know!

I'd be really happy to get some help there. We're not on the latest version. The one holdup I have to handle is will my ISP let us do things we want to it - and them still support it too. They've been super good at that so far, you get an actual human on the line when you call, and one who knows up from down on top - not "Steve from India" but a real admin. No way I want to lose that relationship with them...but I'll ask them once we have some plan for what we want to do, ok?

There are things we can do without stepping on ISP toes, just some simple core code changes and tweaks...

Do you want to be able to display maths via LaTeX? You'll need to create a new bbCode, and I'll need to compile a domain-specific cgi program that resides on my server, as will the cached .png files. I'll do the compile tomorrow, 'cause my son and I are going to throw a round of disc golf this evening before the rain starts.

Well, my main worry is this. If I tell it to back up the site, yeah, it gets all the posts - but none of the pix, and by now, with my mere 3.5mbit download speed, those terabytes would take years to come down. So any upgrade we do to the basic stuff would want to be done really carefully, or perhaps we can talk the ISP (ipower) into backing up the pix separately so we can restore fully if there's an oops. I can get the rest of the db in an overnight download but losing those pix is pretty scary, since we use them a lot here. Guessing, but I think it would take a few large disk drives to even hold them all...

Our biggest issue is an apparent bug - we know not where - that when anyone is logged on as admin, it lets in random spambots (edit, registration does NOT have to be enabled for this to happen). Just during letting in people today - which took a couple hours of frantic cut/paste from a doc I made out of all the request emails in a format to make the cut/paste quick - we got 3, and I had to spend a bit of time wiping the unwanted bots and their posts out after. There's another bug, and I again know not where - it might even be the isp. Periodically the board goes "dark" - unavailable. I sign on as admin, and find the "make board available" setting unchecked, so I check it, and everything is good till next time. But often I'm away from a computer for a whole day and the site being down kinda upsets the other users...

Wow. These guys may have issues.

When did you install the forum? Do you have ftp access? Do they use cPanel or some other hosting maintenance front end, or do you have to go terminal all the way? What's the host's OS? What's the database backend on the host?

Too many questions, I know... Sorry.

Well, seems all ISPs have issues. I like these guys because when you complain, they usually get resolved real quick. Jul 2010 is when this began. Yes, I have FTP access (more on that in a PM). They have, but I don't use, some tools as GUIs, and of course the board itself has GUI tools which I do use. It's running on some linux with mysql backend.

Cool. Coffee is working, so I can compile..

Edit: I changed my .htaccess so we can use images from the Joint here. The cgi is ready for a test when you are.

What happened this morning, Doug? The "i didn't do it" message is a replacement for the board offline notice.

I wish I could look under the hood. Your hosting provider has to be fixing something when this happens, so they know what it is that happened.

They claim they're not doing that. It's gotta be them or a hacker. It happens regularly, about the time I'd suspect they are moving virtual machines around or backing up. When I sign in as admin, the only change is that the board available box is unchecked. I check it and all goes back to normal. In fact, that's why I changed the default message - so people would know it wasn't me shutting things down. Because it isn't me doing that..

Very strange...