Xm Forum Access Problems, Help required please!!!

Well given the length of time the site has been down now, I think this raises serious concerns about long term arrangements. I know that Noz has been told the site is down, but not having access to the server I believe he will be unable to do anything about it.

After this I do believe that Chris needs to reconsider whether he is able to continue hosting the site. It may well be he is unaware it is down, or uncontactable, but maybe we need to seriously look at alternate arrangements being put in place, be that other individuals being given Chris' contact details, or if possible, they (and / or Noz) being given access to the server, so that support could be provided if this happens again.

If that can't be enacted, I believe we should look at moving the site to alternate hosting / setting up a new site.

Anyone concur?

Ciarán

Hi all,
I've been looking at the feasability of having our own website too and have an expert ready to set up a page for me for free, but we would need a server and address of our own.
Chris is involved with about 15 sites hosted by him through xeon-publishing, his servers looks like they are based in California, he also owns Club-xm.uk and his site uses Invision Power Source for it's content, all of which would cost quite a bit of cash! We could do ours through Website Palace and use vBulletin for the content, vBulletin have lots of templates similar to Invision, and it is free to download.
A server is just a good PC but best with a Raid array system and lots of power and once setup it should work away on it's own with a little expert maintenance of coarse. The hosting of these cost up around £85.00 P/Mth but can host 15 sites.
My friend would host it for a little while if required, this would be in Denmark. She says a webpage would cost about £25.00 and I think thats an annual charge, I have seen some in my PC mags for as little as £4.00 but don't know how big we would need it to be. and by the way, I have my doubts about Chris Little giving us any content!
I would hope that Noz will have a lot of the old content backed up but maybe each of us could go in and print all our posts out ready for compiling into a new server, although that would be hard graft!
Regards.
Bob Halliday.

As much as it pains me, the only CURRENT option that I can see is this or FCF.

Unless I'm (happily) proved wrong, this does look like the way things are going to remain
now on www.club-xm.com so unless someone contacts Chris (I thought the surname was
Light?) via the pm in this site we have very few alternatives.

We can either live with this half baked dead on it's feet forum* or go elsewhere whether
that's on the FrenchCarForum where at least funding is assured and all up front with Jim
being very proacxtive and positive for the long term future of the forum,

or

a new mk2 version is set up though the costs will be high as the current existing club-xm
contributors are a bit thin on the ground here at the moment and clearly word on FCF
hasn't brought many back so uptake and awareness of a new site would be minimal/slow.

It's all a sad mess knowing how strong/busy and loved/respected the forum has been lately.

Andrew

*in it's current limited incarnation!!

This post has been edited by Andmcit on April 07, 2009 08:08 am

While it is still possible to send a message to another member, I can't see any way that they would be able to receive it, I think the message part of the forum is down at the moment, I certainly can't get into my messages.

As I don't know the first thing about web hosting I can't offer any suggestions as to what to do next, but I do think we should be considering our options..........

Hi Bob,

I actually have a server based over in the UK which is sitting doing nothing, that could take a site and forum like this with no bother. The issue is, and you've hit the nail on the head, the content.

Say Chris doesn't reappear in the short to medium term, we would be faced with the decision of whether to start completely afresh with a completely empty new site, or hold on in the hope that we may be able to export some of the content from this site.

I'd be quite happy to setup a new site and forum, but I wouldn't do it without the support of users here, as its not going to do anything to improve the situation, and would just cause a split in an already dwindled userbase if Chris did return.

Hopefully he will be back imminiently and correct the database problem, making all of this a non-issue, but in the meantime, how long do we wait around before making a decison?

Has anyone else any opinions on this?

Ciarán

Hi Again,
You are wrong in thinking it's going to cost the earth!!! Most of the stuff is free. The main cost is a Domain name. about £25 for a couple of years. A webpage to host the content, PC Space to use as a server and someone to put all the free software together. I wish Noz could let us know what he knew about it all but I know he is pretty busy just now. the biggest problem is all the lost data and getting all the members together again.
I have plenty of space on my PC, well 250Gb Sata HDD free for now, I've not done a Webpage for about 20 years but my Danish friend taught it in a Swedish University for ages and teachs privately now, and is offering to put it together for me free. The only problem I see is the membership data, We can only see the user names! No phone, email or PM available to us.
The registrant is:-
C A Light
Xeon-Publishing
70 sedlescome Road South
St Leonards on sea
East Sussex TN38 0TJ
Tel 01424718200

I actually have a domain name that might work....

Club-XM.co.uk anyone?

And yes, cost isn't really an issue, I've hosted many sites and the only ones that end up causing an issue are those with massive amounts of traffic, something which this site doesn't suffer from thankfully.


Ciarán

Hi Ciaran.
The best man to talk to about all this has to be Noz! He had some administration rights with the site and I believe he may have some backed up data.
Personally I think the site has been removed because it is being torn down bit by bit, at first I could read all the posts but now I can't even see my own old posts, none of mine were a lot of good anyway, but some posts were better than any service repair manual I've ever seen.
If you could setup and run a forum with Norrie's blessing I would be quite glad to contribute to the yearly costs, as I think most of the members would too, but please try and talk with Noz first.
Regards.
Bob. bobhalliday@live.co.uk

Hi Bob,

As far as I was aware, Norrie had access to the forum administration only, and not the backend server. I may be wrong, but I would suspect that if he had had the appropriate access, this mess would have been sorted out weeks ago.

Must drop him a wee line and see.

Do you happen to know his email address? I have an old Freeserve one for him but not sure if its still current.

Cheers

Ciarán

It would be a real shame to lose this forum, i have not the first idea of websites or hating and such like, so i cant comment. However would it not be possible for a more active member of the forum to have control over it.

We did have a thread recently about forum costs, i think most people said they would be happy to contribute if it meant keeping this site running.

The FCF is a great forum, however it is not very Xm orientated. Its more of a Xantia and C5 forum than anything else. Xm threads are quite slow.

I have always thought the FCF could be made better, the Active section is a good idea, but we should have a Xm, Xantia, C5 etc etc sections. I know there is another citroen forum with a section for each model. However that forum is very slow with few regular topics.

Maybe if this forum should disappear we could request a Xm Area over there, and direct clib-xm members to that. That way we can keep our Xm chat (which does get off topic most of the time - one great thing about this forum!) separate from the 'Citroen' area.

Hi Ciaron.
Norries email is norrie@hirford.freeserve.co.uk I live abou 6miles from him but don't have his address or I would give him a call as I would like to borrow the use of his sphere tester as well as talk to him about the forum.
Log onto www.club-xm.co.uk and you will see it is already owned by someone, my Danish friend says it belongs to Chris, as do about 15 others! But when you do log on you are then offered a box to put in you ideal name and they will find if it is used or not. It's by 123.co.uk and they list the prices too £2.50 or there abouts for a Domain name ?.co.uk. org, net and so on are there too at various costs.
I've looked at some of Chris's other sites. citroen-ca.com, citroencarclub.org.uk, nexenservices.com, saxosports.com and trentino.com, I don't see any resembling our forum. WWW.club-xm.co.uk is dormant.
Regards.
Bob.

Hi all,

Sorry for not getting in touch sooner. I couldn't get back in until Ciaran showed us the back door route. I have tried a mass email but it didn't work.

The problem is that the messages table of the SQL database has crashed. Choosing the repair option does nothing. I have spoken to Chris and he's working on the problem as we speak. Please be patient. The data is not lost but it will prove difficult to migrate to another forum software package. The best hope is that the table can be repaired.

Searching around the net for the specific error message reveals many posts blaming the problem on MYSql5. There are a few patches posted around various websites. We'll be trying a few of those out in due course.

Since the site is entirely non-commercial we can only afford to spend frre time on it at weekends and evenings. This of course makes any maintenance and repair slower than would otherwise be the case.

Do not abandon hope.

Cheers

Norrie

Hi Norrie,

Cheers for the response (was just about to email you), and very glad to hear Chris is now aware of the problem, hopefully the table corruption isn't too severe and the data can be recovered.

MySQL 5 does have a few infamous flaws, however we've been lucky to be unaffected up until now.

On the site front, I didn't mean to seem impatient or anything like that, I appreciate you look after the site on a voluntary basis, just as everyone contributing useful posts here does so on the same guise. Just with it running on for a number of weeks we were getting concerned.

The whole situation does highlight the contingency of the site and its hosting. If yourself and Chris are willing, I believe it would be prudent to discuss the possibility of giving administrative access to one or more additional members, in case such a scenario should present itself in the future. You nor Chris cannot be expected to be at the beck and call of a free car forum on the internet, however I believe if we could increase the spread of administrators, we could probably negate any outage of this length or severity in future.
Just a suggestion.

Cheers

Ciarán

Hi Ciaran et al,

You're points are valid and well noted. When the site first started I suppose none of use could have imagined how it would grow and how important it became to XM enthusiasts everywhere (globally, to coin McDooms favourite word) in keeping their favourite cars on the road. For that reason not much attention was paid to the forum software and its attendant maintenance requirements (that is not to say that it got no attention at all). Having said that, dont' forget, it has served us well for the last 6 years with only two relatively minor glitches. The last glitch was allocated server space. Such is the success of Club-Xm that it grew in the background and crept up to its space limits without being immediately obvious.

It is obvious now that the forum software needs to be updated, particulaly with security in mind. Things move on in 6 years. The world is a bit more complicated than it was 6 years ago.

Chris started this site and in particular this forum in Aug 2003 and I joined in Nov 2003. After a short while Chris granted me admin rights so that I could perform the day to day maintenance. From that point on Chris pretty much left me to my own devices which was a bit trusting of him I must say. Apart from a period a couple of years back when we were inundated with self-registering bots, the forum has pretty much looked after itself. After fixing the security feature on the registration page we've not had any bots. The recent rogue porn posters are actual real people. There's not much I can do about that other than banning IP's.

From the admin account I can do quite a lot of forum maintenance but no software maintenance. Its up to Chris to do that. To be fair the software, just like windows, warns you of available updates automatically and offers you the option of updating accordingly. Unfortunately now, IPB version 1.2 is no longer supported so thats the main driver to upgrade. Upgrading is not as easy as it sounds. Every forum software uses different table setubs in the database. There is no one standard (as I understand it). Migrating the data from the current database to a new one keeping all of the members registration details, post counts, posts and attachments is fraught with problems, but not impossible.

We will try to fix the existing table to give us a little breathing space. If successful we'll look around for a new forum application. If it fails then the next task is to try to recover the data from the database and migraet it to a new forum application. If anyone has any first hand knowledge of this then by all means wade in. I am reasonably IT literate but have very little knowledge of SQL, although I'm reasonable proficient at MS Access.

For this particular issue and others like it, increasing the number of admin accounts would not have helped. I understand the philosophy of sharing the load but, when running properly, the forum needs very little admin. As a pleasant surprise it doesn't even need much moderation such is the good nature of club-xm's members. In any case its Chris's decision as site owner, not mine. I am simply grateful for the opportunity to administer the site on Chris's behalf, ultimately for the benefit of XM owners everywhere.

As I've said, please be patient. The solution is being worked on.

Cheers

Norrie

Hi Norrie,

Thanks for that detailed and informative response.

I do agree the forum from a resource use point of a view seems to have become a victim of its own success, which understandbly was never anticipated back in the day, when it was first setup.

With regard to the database issues, I'm quite proficient with SQL if that is any use to you or Chris in resolving the problem. Do you know whats wrong, is it table corruption or simply missing indexes and the like?

On the software front, there are numerous popular forums out there, the two most notable of which being PhpBB (which French Car Forum uses) and vBulletin. These are widely used, well supported with plenty of 3rd party addons, and most importantly, free. They also have a much better feature set than Invision Power Board which the site is currently using. The main driver for considering something like PhpBB is that there are several scripts which can migrate IPB databases to a PhpBB site, and there is a lot of documentation on doing so. Chris may wish to continue with a newer version of IPB of course, but I believe this is commercial software so will obviously incur a cost, where as PhpBB is free, and arguably better.

The migration process is usually straightforward enough (I have done a few), however it does usually require you to have an intact database on your existing forum. That said, if we can't get to the point of having sound tables, it should be possible to modify one of the migration scripts, or analyze the queries its performing and manually recreate the non-volatile data (e.g forum IDs, headers etc, rather than actual post content). I've had to do that on a few occasions in the past and its not as drastic as it sounds, you just have to analyze the table structure of the old and new boards, and its usually possible to work out what format it will want the data in, and write some queries to provide it accordingly.

That's just a thought anyway.

Regarding the administration thing, I realise that's a choice for Chris to make. What I was referring to though was access to the back end and DB itself, not admin on the actual forum. As you say, having additional forum admin accounts wouldn't have prevented the downtime on this occasion, however if we'd had server access then attempts could have been made to repair the database before now, and it wouldn't have been left all down to Chris and yourself to do it.

Cheers

Ciarán

This post has been edited by Ciaran on April 06, 2009 02:46 pm