TOCH Down :(

[Alex Smart]

Hi, was quite disappointed when I found this site down earlier. Am Greatly Pleased that it is now back on line again .
Well done to those behind the screens that keep it up to date and safe.
👏👏👏

[Bombphoon]

Same here - I noticed I couldn't access it the other night and also just an hour ago? Was it maintenance?

[Chris Goss]

Such things happen?

[Alex Smart]

Welcome back. Very odd that two breakdowns in so short of time. But so glad the forums are now back up again.
Hope nothing more goes wrong.

[TigerTimon]

Happy to be here again! :-D

[Ruy Horta]

Don’t rejoice too soon.
I’ve managed to get the forum working again by clearing the postindex.
However it may fail soon again because my provider lowered the dbase space.
This is added to the fact that I am running a very old version of vbulletin software, which requires me to use an very old version of PHP and although my provider does offer this at cost it is not ideal.

So it is all about 3 options

1. Continue doing nothing until it breaks
2. Update vBulletin to latest version
3. Migrate to another forum application

Option 2 offers a direct upgrade path, option 3 most likely does not because of the old vBulletin version.

What I don’t understand is the database restriction, will check why they enforce it without the option to pay for extra space.

[Alex Smart]

Thak you Ruy for your detailed reply.
May I offer a possible solution?
Would it be an opportunity to address the membership of perhaps an opportunity to subscribe some sort of financial membership fee ? Or even voluntary contribution to help save and keep the TOCH alive for years to come ?

The membership list shows a total membership of 4,705.

[JaganP]

Originally Posted by Ruy Horta

1. Continue doing nothing until it breaks
2. Update vBulletin to latest version
3. Migrate to another forum application

Option 2 offers a direct upgrade path, option 3 most likely does not because of the old vBulletin version.

FWIW,

RAFCommands went through the same pain points - out of date vBulletin (Version 4), PHP was not supported beyond PHP5 and database was limited to 300MB size.

I dragged it out as long as I could, and finally the service provider pulled the plug. Option 2 was the way to go

The caveats around Option 2 - the latest version of VB is v6. the migration from v3 to v6 will be handled by it, but the DB size will increase significantly. I suspect RAFC went from 300MB to 550MB overnight, and once the search indexes were built it was 1.5GB in size. That being said, the extra bells and whistles were worth it.

The old service provider would have charged a packet for a DB of that size - and I figured out that it was easier to simply go for AWS LightSail. its cheap (cheaper than the previous provider), reliable, and the automatic backups gives you peace of mind.

If you really don't want the hassle of worrying about your server - perhaps the vb6 cloud hosting plan is the way to go - but it is a tad expensive.