We are back--thank you for all the support! - Page 4

Podshell · #31 11-10-2023, 04:50 PM

Don't they do transactions direct through banks these days,I used to usually send money that way,but only in UK,not sure how it would work internationally,perhaps agents will be needed but on one talkboard I use to post on the donation page had their bank details on instructing that you could do it this way if you resided in the UK.

lagomorpheus · #32 11-10-2023, 05:16 PM

phewww!! i was really scared about the site bcz i didn't know what happened! thank you so much for preserving and keeping up this awesome website

JustBe · #33 12-10-2023, 04:00 AM

It’s glitchy I’m noticing.

#34 12-10-2023, 07:07 AM

So far for me it seems to be ok,very good actually.....

Gosh I really mi$$ed this place!!

lostsoul13 · #35 12-10-2023, 12:17 PM

Glad things are back and running!

annonafox · #36 12-10-2023, 03:48 PM

Thank you all so much for being so sweet. Thank you

#37 12-10-2023, 08:25 PM

We love ya so much Anno!!

AngelBlue · #38 13-10-2023, 07:32 AM

Thanks to Heidi and all concerned with getting the site back up and running again.
I'm in the same position with regard to a donation with being in the UK and not having PayPal . I will try to see if there is a way round it.

inspirit · #39 13-10-2023, 08:35 PM

Just a quick overview of what took this site down:

One day the site was just suddenly broken. When Heidi got me involved I contacted HostGator and they were basically no help.
It seemed like they were trying to blame the problem on the vBulletin software which of course was never the problem.

Frustrated with HostGator I tried to get a server going with a different hosting company called Kamatera. After almost 2 weeks of working on that, long story short, they were unable to help me when I ran into trouble installing the PHP version that we needed, namely PHP 5.6.

As that was happening I was still trying to get a help from HostGator and thankfully so because I was able to get through to someone from HostGator who said that the problem was with our server and that they could help if we purchased a new server. And we jumped on that.

From there it only took a few hours to transfer the site from the old server to the new server, and for the site to be back up and running.
The hiccup that came a few days later was a DNS issue but now that is resolved as well.

Since then I did some other tweaking as well. I fixed the character encoding. For some reason it was set wrong for what appears to be the last 17 years.
It was declared as ISO-8859-1 but in reality it was UTF-8 which meant that it wasn't displaying properly.

I also fixed a few other things like the chat which was designed to work with an older version of PHP. I just had to update the code a little to work with PHP 5.6.

And I enabled gzip. and Cloudflare. among other things.

Lynn · #40 13-10-2023, 10:32 PM

Hello

We are forever grateful that the site is back again. Members showed that the site is of value to them, and I am still here in supports.

I have noticed that I get into the Admin Panel now with ease. No more your passwords needs re set.

I hope that members will use the Chat Room a bit more again. That used to be a hub of activity.

I met my now husband in that very chat room.....

Lynn