Greetings . . .

The test upgrade was completed several days ago on the clone system. Preparations for the upgrade proved to be more work than the actual execution of the upgrade script - including a nice dose of tedium in checking file system permissions

During the upgrade process I needed assistance from our hosting provider (Ipower) just twice. Ipower support is very responsive in live-chats and the engineers are quick to resolve problems when presented with specific issues/error-diagnostics.

So far testing has revealed just one run-time issue, and curiously it is with the new Attachment Manager functionality. It turned out to be an issue with the older version 7.5.8 Style sheets in general, and our custom version which includes our Inliners branding. I have worked around the problem. What remains are largely cosmetic issues that I intend to address later with a custom Style sheet developed on the new version.

The remaining issues were all isolated to the Admin panels used to configure the forums software. The good news is that 7.7.5 has been in the street since Oct of '20. Consequently, every issue I have encountered so far has an already documented fix.

As a result I feel comfortable in moving forward with the upgrade on the live system.

Moreover, the test system cloning procedure affords me a direct backup and recovery mechanism. With an export of the underlying database and snapshot of the online file systems - I am in position to abandon the upgrade process at any point.

Here's the plan:

1) Late Sunday night (eastern time zone) I will close the Forums to any additional postings.
2) I will then export the database and take a snap-shot of the file systems to establish a recovery point.
3) Early Monday morning I will upload the UBB 7.7.5 software onto the live system and execute the upgrade scripts.
4) This will 'time' the completion of the upgrade process to coincide with the arrival of the weekday support engineers at Ipower.
5) I will complete the post processing steps on Monday morning. If I encounter any of the same issues I did during the test upgrade - the weekday engineers will be available at Ipower to assist.
6) Sometime mid-day the Forums will be open again for posting. If all goes well we will be running the newest version.
7) Should we encounter any problems in live operations we'll have the test system running in the shadows to validate fixes.


Regards,
stock49

Excellent! Thanks for putting in so much hard work to benefit all of us and the club.

Keith, Thank you for all the work you have put int this. I hope this will get us where we want to be. I feel this could really help the club grow through the website. THANKS!

We are all aware what can happen to pictures posted on forums over time. We've seen it here and on others. As time has gone on, advances in forum software can now allow direct posting of them to message boards. So hopefully the ease to do that along with a more permanent way to preserve them can now be at hand.

GOOD LUCK stock49!

We discussed this some in our chapter meeting today. We thank Keith for his effort and like the improvement. Things are better and easier. Al was not there so we were not able to talk about what else can be done. Some members were panning to become more active here. I hope they will.