Forum and server software update November or December 2022

[Martijn Meerts]

Hi all!

 

Once again, it's time for an update of the forum's software, and by extension the server's software.

 

Forum wise, there was a new, fairly big update a while ago. We tend to not immediately update bigger releases due to potential bugs, but it's about time we start working on the update. (Also, the giant messages the admins see that an update is available is getting annoying ...)

 

With this update, the forum will also require PHP8 as a minimum, which means the server software itself will also need an update. This should be relatively straight forward.

 

I will perform the update either later this week / early next week, or otherwise more towards the end of the year. With the update, I'll also renew the server license for another year or so, which should give us a nice discount.

 

[cteno4]

Thanks martijn! Yes the big blue banner does get annoying!

 

im having very slow load times the last month (up to 30 seconds) on the unread content page (it’s gotten progressively worse the last year). Other pages load quickly. I think there was a cashe issue a couple years back that you worked on that fixed this the last time this happened. Otherwise not seeing any issues with current version, let’s see what breaks, er is better, with the upgrades!

 

thanks again for all the under the hood work! Much appreciated!

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Yep, it’s been slow for me as well, haven’t really looked into it that much, and there weren’t really any complaints, so I figured it wasn’t high priority.

 

Performance wise, both the webserver and the database server should easily be able to handle everything, but I’ll do a bit of monitoring. Might be the caching server has gotten a bit wonky over the years, and needs a purge.

[cteno4]

Yeah I meant to post on the unread content page to see if that was an issue for others. I seem to remember you kicking the cashing server before and the issue went away. I think it started whe you started or upgraded the cashing server a few years back. It’s not horrible, just makes me practice patience! 
 

thanks,

 

jeff

[bill937ca]

I'm not having slow load times and I put a big load on my system with You Tube and streaming radio.  I use Chrome and its a desktop.

Edited November 23, 2022 by bill937ca

[miyakoji]

Yeah site performance seems fine to me.

Edited November 23, 2022 by miyakoji

[Martijn Meerts]

8 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Yeah I meant to post on the unread content page to see if that was an issue for others. I seem to remember you kicking the cashing server before and the issue went away. I think it started whe you started or upgraded the cashing server a few years back. It’s not horrible, just makes me practice patience! 
 

thanks,

 

jeff

 

Yeah, that's quite possible. They deprecated the caching solution they had, so I had to set up something new. I can't quite remember if I set up a local caching server on the webserver itself, or if I spun up a new server / service for it. I'll have to look into that when I'm doing the upgrades.

 

Although, theoretically, unread content shouldn't get cached since it changes quite often. But, we'll see 🙂

 

[cteno4]

Yeah doesn’t seem like cashing would be the issue there, more like the work would be in thebuild of the page looking at the user’s forum history. It’s the only page build for me that is ever slow.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Apparently, if you click the 'mark site read', even if you don't have any unread posts anymore, it'll speed up again. Seems like it's keeping track of some data that doesn't get removed correctly, but does get removed when you mark the entire site as read.

 

[cteno4]

Awesome sauce Martijn! That did it, loads right away. I figured it was some pile of dirty data that the db was sifting thru to build the unread content page and just slowing it way down!

 

thanks mucho!

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

I uhm.. Kinda totally forgot about this update, so December 2022 will be a bit tight 🙂

 

I'll get it done soon, most likely within the next couple of weeks.

 

[cteno4]

No worries, the update banners don’t seem to be the intense red ones saying the world is about to end!

 

have a good new year martijn.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Hey all!

 

I've been a bit quiet recently due to busyness and some issues here and there, which meant I wasn't really able to get on the forum much. Life is still very busy, but I figured I should do some maintenance work, since Amazon keeps mailing me about out of date services and whatnot.

 

So, while I've not yet been able to update the forum software itself, or some of the server software, I have done the following:

• Updated the caching service we use to the latest version. This should have no effect on usability of the forum.
• Updated the security policy on our S3 buckets which is used to store all uploaded files. Again, this shouldn't have any effect on the forum itself, however, if you're using a very old mobile device, or a very old OS version, you might have issues with images not loading. Later in the year Amazon will start enforcing that new security policy, so there's not really much we can do for the old devices.
• Purchased reserved instances for both the web server and database server. Basically, this just means I paid for 1 year in advance to get a pretty good discount.

 

That being said, I did transfer some money from the donations account to my personal bank account in order to then pay the credit card bill for those reserved instances. We currently have enough in the donations account to extend the reserved instances for another year, as well as pay for the forum license for another year. So again, thanks for all the donations, it definitely helps keeping things going 🙂

 

[tossedman]

Thanks for keeping everything up and running Martijn!

[Martijn Meerts]

Hello again!

 

So, with a rather major delay, I will finally get this update done sometime in the next week or two.

 

There shouldn't be any major hicups I hope, although I am updating some underlying tech to new major versions. I'm not sure exactly which day I'll do the update, or how long it's going to take. So if the forum is down sometime in the coming week, you know why 🙂

 

 

[cteno4]

Thanks Martijn! Much appreciated by all of us!

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

Just a quick heads up. Tomorrow during the late morning / early afternoon I'll very likely (finally) update the server software, and if all goes well, the forum software.

 

So, starting from around 11am CET (https://everytimezone.com/s/27a174ec for local times I think), the forum can go into maintenance mode for a while. I'm not expecting any major issues, so downtime shouldn't be too long.

 

[Martijn Meerts]

The server and forum software have been updated.

 

There were some minor issues updating the PHP version on the server, but that was fixed relatively easily. There was also a minor issue with the search box in the template which should also be fixed.

 

If you come across any other issues, please let us know so we can look into fixing it. As always, the forum might be a little bit slower than usual while some post-upgrade background tasks are running.

 

We have also added an additional variant of the default theme called 'Railstar VIF'. VIF stands for 'Visually Impaired Friendly', and this is a them where the colours have a slightly higher contract and the fonts are somewhat bigger overall. This should help people who had a hard time reading the somewhat small fonts on the regular version of the theme. If any additional adjustments are needed to help make it more readable, just send me a message and I'll look into it.

 

In order to select the new theme, scroll down to the bottom of the page, where there will be a dropdown that says 'Theme'. Click on that, and then select 'Railstar VIF'

 

Edited June 17, 2023 by disturbman

[Martijn Meerts]

A quick follow up on this...

 

There were a few issues with the theme after the update. In the past updates, quite a few changes had been made to the default theme supplied by Invision. Since we were using a custom theme, those changes were not automatically also applied to our custom theme. Usually, the changes are relatively minor, but with the latest updates almost every single theme file had been updated.

 

Rather than try to fix the old theme, and considering our custom theme really only has some colour changes, I decided to create a new theme based off of the default theme. What this means, is that when there's another forum software update, our custom coloured them will automatically also get the updates from the base theme. The limiting factor here, is that we can't make any major theme changes, but since we've not done that the past years anyway, it should be fine.

 

The new them is called 'Railstar V2', and should be automatically selected for everyone. The new visually impaired friendly theme is now also based off the new default theme, and that is called 'Railstar V2 - VIF'

 

[Martijn Meerts]

One additional comment 🙂

 

After the update, you can no longer log in using your display name, but only using your email address. I think most people already did this in the first place, but due to security risks, the authors of the forum software have deprecated logging in using your display name, and will soon be removed.

 

The security risk, was that display names are publicly visible to everyone visiting the site, so it was a bit too easy for people to attempt to brute force their way into an account. Email addresses however are NOT publicly visible.

 

[cteno4]

Thanks very much for all the great server work Martijn!

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[miyakoji]

Thanks Martijn!

[Martijn Meerts]

And another follow up on this...

 

The forum software gets a maintenance release about once a month. Rather than wait for bigger updates which take a long time, I want to update the system shortly after a new (maintenance) release is available.

 

These releases should be quick to install, and should only require very little downtime of the forum.

 

With that in mind, do you all prefer I notify you when I'm planning on doing the update, or is it fine if I just run the update when I have the time to do so?

 

[cteno4]

Martijn,

 

as you have to do all this work for all of us, please do it your leisure! I doubt many of us will remember a targeted date/time an update will happen and hopefully we can keep ourselves from go into withdrawals during the short updates. We can just go run a train. Make it as easy as possible on yourself.

 

maybe we can just have a forum updates topic where you can post the date when updates happened in case folks notice any glitches that occur after an update.

 

Thanks again for being the gnome in the gears keeping things running smoothly.

 

jeff

[disturbman]

Agreed with Jeff, do the small ones as your leisure. I don't think many of us need advance notice.