Count me in too!
Pete

But if you are going out to one of the big website hosters be careful who you go with as some are rather rough & ready

Yeah, don't I know it. And the company doesn't have to be a $2 per month job to be unreliable either. Where I work, we use an externally-hosted and provided work order system which allows staff to lodge maintenance requests. It is a professional, enterprise-grade system that has been around for donkeys years and the company has hundreds of customers - yet their so-called outsourced enterprise hosting let them down to the point where their system behaved pretty much the way this site is at the moment.

And, that is the thing - when its free it is a little easier to tolerate. When it costs thousands per annum and is relied on by hundreds of people in a work environment the inconvenience is compounded.

VR was originally hosted on a commercial webhost over in Western Australia. They were (and probably still are) very good and I never had reliability issues relating to the hosting. The reason I stopped using them was that there were features I needed for the operation of this site that they were not able to provide. As far as that webhost goes, they've changed ownership a few times so I am not sure if they are of the same quality as when I used them.

I'm just hoping that the move to the new server will sort things out. To be honest I can't see why it won't but I will get the migration done and then see how that goes.

Is there a problem with the task that converts URLs to clickable links? It doesn't seem to be running at present.

I've noticed it can take a couple of days to do its thing.

ZScan runs twice a day at random times and does several jobs, one of which is converting certain text to links. Some spelling errors also get corrected and the same process removes excessive whitespace (caused by pressing the Enter key too many times) that users add to their posts at the end of their comments to make the forums more presentable. The process is currently working. On the very rarest occasions it'll fail to read a URL for some un-known reason though if a URL is not correctly formatted (with a http:// or https:// prefix, for example) then it will not convert it. EG: If a member types vintage-radio.com.au then this won't be enough for the robot to see it as a link. It would need to be https://vintage-radio.com.au/ to be seen.

The switchover planned for tomorrow is not going ahead due to the SSL certificates not working on the new server. I will get more next week and then try again. The site is working there however, which is a good sign.

Brad, would you consider posting your bank details so those of us who care could make a donation to the cause?

I second that. I don't mind subsidising some hardware by contribution.
Silly chip costs about $10 a month and i'd forget buying that for a few months and buy VR instead and get more from that!
Don't go down the subscription road it will cost more to administrate in work and time than is worth..
If you want just give us the Acc name, BSB and acc#numbers, everybody should be able to kick in $30 if someone doesn't like that tough.luck.
Even a poor pensioner like me can afford that.
Cheers, Fred.

There was a similar situation a while back over on Antique radios.
The owner of the site , does not charge members. Than one day his dog got sick and the Vet bill was so big he could not meet the payments of the site provider so he put a post on and explained the situation.
Regular members all joined in and sent some bucks to keep it going .

Pete

Thanks Brad for your efforts with the site and a speedy recovery from that cold.

Wintertime colds can be pretty miserable.

Cheers

Yep I can pay a bit as well. only too happy to.

Maybe I've been lucky, but since this thread started I've had almost no trouble connecting.

When it does look like it might time out I just go elsewhere and try again later.

Yes, it's been good for me, too, and in saying that I hope I haven't spoken of the devil.

Maybe I've been lucky, but since this thread started I've had almost no trouble connecting.

You've been lucky.

I've been rebooting the server fairly regularly for the last week or so when I've run into a potential 500 Error, and I'm glad to hear it is helping a bit.

One other thing that is helping is the clean-up I've done on the front page and the side bar. With all the stuff I've removed the site is loading a bit quicker on many pages. Once it is confirmed that the new server is working well I will redesign the front page so it doesn't look like it's been squashed by an anvil.

It only take a couple of days for an SSL certificate to be issued so once I have that the switchover will happen very late on the same night. The new server is working on both the SSL and non-secure ports however if I switch over now, everyone will be confronted with the scary warning about the certificate not working.

I hope that the cutover to the new server will go ahead some time tonight, as planned.