Why The Site Has Been Up And Down

[Phillyman]

Why The Site Has Been Up And Down

Warning: The following will contain strong language!

You may be asking yourself what the hell has been going on with Retromags since last week. Lets start with some background information, the Retromags forum runs on Invision Power Board software. Our forums, download section and the new blog section are all Official Invision products. Now with any website, people want to customize their sites to accomplish a goal that is not built into the existing software. These "modifications" to the existing Invision software is not supported by Invision, they only support the basic install. These "third party" modifications can be free or paid, and they can created by a company or an individual with PHP coding knowledge. Retromags runs quite a few of these third party modifications, the Arcade, Battle System, Casino....are all examples. Now that you understand how this site works, we can go into why we have been up and down! About 8 months ago I bought a third party modification for Retromags, this software was called Community SEO and it promised to make Retromags show up better in search engine results. This Community SEO software rewrote our existing URLs to become less cryptic.

Before

http://www.retromags.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4932

After

http://www.retromags.com/forums/topic/4932-reputation-system-online/

As you can see the After URL is much more descriptive and results in us being higher up in search engine results. Well last week I got to thinking that it would be nice if we had a shorter URL, I had wanted to do a small change on Retromags.

Before

http://www.retromags.com/forums

After

http://forums.retromags.com

Well the third party software I had purchased from Community SEO, they have a key that is critical to the functionality of the software working. I sent a polite request to the Owner of Community SEO and asked if he could issue Retromags a new key that would allow us to change our current URL. This initial request was made on August 13th at 2:41PM....I left work at 5PM and arrived home at 6:30PM later that night. At 7:30PM I was about to go on my daily walk around the neighborhood and all the sudden Retromags collapsed! I spent the next two hours trying to figure out why NO links worked on Retromags, and why NO links from Google to Retromags were working. The entire site fell apart and I could not figure out why, I left work at 5PM and made no changes that I could see would bring the entire site down. Finally around 9:30 I figured it out, the Owner of Community SEO fulfilled part of my request.....the part of disabling my current key (but not issuing a new key). The entire site was down and I tried EVERYTHING to bring us back up. I tried multiple ways to contact the owner of this modification to have him issue me a key to make our website work again. Well the fucking douche bag never got back to me! Now I paid this prick for his software, and all I asked was for two simple things.....First to disable my current key.....Second to issue a new one! Now he could have done nothing at all, he could have done it....but nooooo he had to do a half ass job. Finally at 11:30PM I made a decision.....to upgrade our website in order to bring us back up. As of August 13th we were running Invision Power Board 2.3.5....about 2 months ago Invision came out with a major release of Invision Power Board 3.0. I had told Meppi and Triverse that I had wanted to wait 6-8 months so that they could iron all the bugs out of IPB 3.0.....I also wanted to have this time to allow the authors of the Arcade/Battle system we use to come out with versions of their systems for this new software.

Now my hands were tied, I had a totally down website....and had to make a choice. So I decided at 11:30 on August 13th to upgrade us to IPB 3.0. This meant that our Battle System, Arcade, Casino and a few other features would not work afterwords. Just so you guys know....today is August 17th and that prick has still not answered my emails to him. So if I had not upgraded us to 3.0....the site would still be down. The rest of the past few days has been trying to iron out some of the more major issues with this recent upgrade. I think most of the big problems have been solved....but I still have many smaller issues to take care of.

So now onto the Q+A.....

Q: Will the Arcade/Battle/Casino return?

A: I am 90% sure they will, We just need to wait for the coders to get us a new version for this software

Q: Will my scores be retained?

A: They should, cant promise though.

Q: Where is the subscription manager so I can become a Premium Member?

A: That was a built in feature of 2.3.5 but now in 3.0 it is an addon.....and is still in beta testing

Q: Where did the Wiki go?

A: Invision 3.0 does not like how our wiki is set up, so I moved our wiki to http://www.retromags.net/wiki

Q: Where is the Dark Skin?

A: That was only compatible on 2.3.5, I am looking for a suitable dark skin for 3.0. Its at the top of my list.

Q: Can you put the "most recent discussions" back on the Portal?

A: At this moment I can only do the most recent topics on the Portal, I can only get the most recent discussions to work on the forum index. Will try to fix soon.

Q: You say you installed this third party software for nice urls, but they seem nice now without it?

A: The new 3.0 software has Friendly URLS built in, the old 2.3.5 software I was running needed an addon.

Please feel free to ask me any other questions you may have, and I will do my best to answer

[joedick]

Wow, I didn't know there was so much drama behind the changes. Thanks for all your hard work, as always.

[Phillyman]

Wow, I didn't know there was so much drama behind the changes. Thanks for all your hard work, as always.

Thanks Its been a living nightmare the past few days. Each time I fix one thing...another breaks!

Portal didnt work

Fixed it! Then Portal didnt show up as home page

Fixed it! Then Wiki started showing up as home page

Fixed it! {Waiting for next thing to break}

[E-Day]

Boy, am I glad I am not you when it comes to this stuff. I commend you for not going apeshit on anyone or anything during all this. I probably would have!

[Phillyman]

Boy, am I glad I am not you when it comes to this stuff. I commend you for not going apeshit on anyone or anything during all this. I probably would have!

All that guy needed to do is issue me a new key, instead he disabled the key I PAID for....and ignored me contacting him. I am beyond pissed and will make sure to spread this story around.

[triverse]

Boy, am I glad I am not you when it comes to this stuff. I commend you for not going apeshit on anyone or anything during all this. I probably would have!

Oh if you only knew....   lol

[Hidinger]

All that guy needed to do is issue me a new key, instead he disabled the key I PAID for....and ignored me contacting him. I am beyond pissed and will make sure to spread this story around.

Got an email address where we can send hate mail? They closed down flag@whitehouse.gov.

Also...if there is no email address for the guys giving you a hard time do you have a physcial address? I know some guys in dark suits...

[meppi]

Also...if there is no email address for the guys giving you a hard time do you have a physcial address? I know some guys in dark suits...

I'm not sure how erasing his memory will help us out though...

[triverse]

I'm not sure how erasing his memory will help us out though...  

It's all in how creative the story you tell them they now are to think is real, is.  You could really mess his mind up.

[meppi]

It's all in how creative the story you tell them they now are to think is real, is.  You could really mess his mind up.

Well only if he has it done to him on multiple occasions, but what are the chances of that happening?

As for a believable story? Swamp gas. Works every single time.

[Gnash]

The system was slow for me but I found it was IE and a weird version of Java that I had. Using Firefox solved the problem.

[E-Day]

I think it's just that weird Java more than IE. I have used this new system in IE 7 and IE 8, and it is plenty fast.

[Gnash]

Also just in case anyone is still using IE6. The site will not work properly on it.

[Mister Zero]

I personally don't care or use the arcade and all that, though I know almost everyone else does and it's a nice addition to the forums.

I'm just glad RM is back up! Thanks for going through all the trouble lately!

[DPsx7]

Dang, that's a rough spot to be in. Either leave the forum offline for an indefinite amount of time or lose many of the things we once had, for however long it takes to create new ones.

And I worked so hard to obtain those arcade scores in case you were going to have another prize this year... Lol. I hope they're saved. However one good thing is that maybe I can get the rest of the permissions needed to finally sort out all the games like I was going to do months ago. We need to revise the categories and remove broken games.

[Phillyman]

Update: He replied tonite!

Apparently the key expiring was not his fault. When I originally bought the software I did a 6 month subscriptions......and then I upgraded to a LIFETIME key....but I guess his records are screwy and it still had me down as 6 months....and declined my key on the exact day I sent him a request!

[Hidinger]

Update: He replied tonite!

Apparently the key expiring was not his fault. When I originally bought the software I did a 6 month subscriptions......and then I upgraded to a LIFETIME key....but I guess his records are screwy and it still had me down as 6 months....and declined my key on the exact day I sent him a request!

Did you get it straightened out? I hope he realizes that you paid for the lifetime subscription.

[Phillyman]

Did you get it straightened out? I hope he realizes that you paid for the lifetime subscription.

I thought I straightened this out 6 months ago.....when he charged me again thru Paypal.....for software that I paid for a Perpetual License

[triverse]

I thought I straightened this out 6 months ago.....when he charged me again thru Paypal.....for software that I paid for a Perpetual License  

I hope we are just sticking with the 3.0 on this one, if not, let me know now so I can arrange a day to go back and change those links back...

[Phillyman]

I hope we are just sticking with the 3.0 on this one, if not, let me know now so I can arrange a day to go back and change those links back...

I probably will never go back to using Community SEO, The friendly URLs are now a built in feature of the Invision Software.....and I already found a (NEW) third party modification for generating sitemaps. Cost me $8 for a lifetime license....but even if it stopped working....it would not cause a shitstorm like the Community SEO software did.

[triverse]

I probably will never go back to using Community SEO, The friendly URLs are now a built in feature of the Invision Software.....and I already found a (NEW) third party modification for generating sitemaps. Cost me $8 for a lifetime license....but even if it stopped working....it would not cause a shitstorm like the Community SEO software did.

$8!!! That's it, Retromags is broke now! lol  That is cheap for something like that, congrats on finding it.

[Schloss Ritter]

Wow, that's sucks going through all that. I haven't been around in a while, but I'm glad things are coming back together.