Anyone else having forum problems?

[Pete_kaye]

Anyone else having problems today uploading photos on here and long delays generally?

[paulsherwin]

The forum has been behaving completely normally for me this morning.

[Station X]

What error messages or W.H.Y did the OP receive?

[Pete_kaye]

No messages . Just did not happen . Must be my iPad .

[davidw]

Just a thought, my sons iPad and iPhone did long winded updates yesterday (friday) which, for the duration, slowed things down a lot for him. Maybe yours was updating?

[DMcMahon]

All seems OK for me yesterday and today.

David

[Chris55000]

I'm getting persistent problems with the same posts in a thread repeating over and over again even on "page 2" and "page 3" whenever I select the next page along from the buttons at the bottom, a recent example being the "ICC8 Frame fault".

Chris Williams

[Paul Stenning]

All looks fine to me.

[McMurdo]

For a few weeks now I'm getting an old problem which is when clicking on thumbnails for photos, only the first one opens, clicking 'next' is ignored and I can only view it by right-clicking and 'open link in new tab'. Even then, sometimes I only get half a picture with the other half just white.

It happened a few years ago too but went away.

[Julesomega]

I've just had the problem uploading images; the 'manage' window gave a message in red about not uploading and "the management team have been informed"
I posted my reply without images, but the text 3? came out as 3?

[Julesomega]

There you go - 3 (capital Omega) -> 3?

[Paul Stenning]

I had a database error email about that one. Problem is the ohm symbol isn't valid for the current database collation, hence the question mark. At some point I will change all database tables to UTF-8 but it needs testing first and the forum will need to be closed while it is done.

[Julesomega]

Thanks, I'll rename my images and try again - but have you any news on posting an ohms symbol?

[Paul Stenning]

Until I change the database collation to UTF-8 it's not possible. I'll probably look at it over the Christmas break but no promises.

[paulsherwin]

As a general rule, it's advisable to post using the standard ASCII character set rather than trying to use Unicode stuff or emojis. It can produce all sorts of strange database errors without necessarily giving any meaningful feedback to the poster.

[Julesomega]

Here's an Ohm sign - I copied it from this post last year

?

and here's one I copied from a textfile

?

(edit) didn't work but I can live with that

[Boulevardier]

So how come there was an ohm symbol possibility that worked
back in 2002?

Mike

[paulsherwin]

The database software has changed in that time. As Paul suggests, it can be reconfigured to reduce the issues, but there's a fair bit of work involved.

[Paul Stenning]

Yes, the forum has moved to different hosting a few times since 2002, and hosting software including databases has changed considerably over that time. There was a MySQL database server update from 5.7 to 8.0 recently (because 5.7 was end-of-life) which has caused some of these character set issues.

I set the forum software to use UTF-8 after that update to make it mostly work, but the database tables are all still standard ASCII. I need to change all the database tables to UTF-8 too, which should hopefully solve these niggles, but it is a big job and needs testing thoroughly first as it could break other things. I intend to look into this over the Christmas break.

The version of vBulletin we are using (3.8.11) doesn't officially support MySQL above 5.7. It is out of support and hasn't had any updates since 2017. So changes and fixes to keep it working as the server software is updated are up to me to sort.

Updating to the current version of vBulletin would cost $180 initially then $80 per year for updates, so that's not happening. We will keep going with what we have for as long as possible.

Eventually I will need to look into moving to something like phpBB, Simple Machines or MyBB which are all open source. However none of them have fully working converters so migrating will be a massive job (the decision of one which to use would probably be which is the least difficult to migrate to).

[Nuvistor]

Are their other issues besides the ohm symbol, seems a lot of work and uncertainty just to fix that item?