[Administrator]

Last night, I am sure many of you are aware that the board was upgraded and we suffered some very up/down outages.

Around 9:30 pm, I performed some very in depth upgrades that included the most stable and secure version of vBulletin, vBulletin Blog, vBSEO script and some other patches. I thought it would be an easy upgrade as I have done these many times before. Well, it wasn't. The board appeared to be up and working properly for about an hour after the upgrade. I was tweaking the board templates to re-enable our add-on and customized scripts when all of a sudden the board died.

I fought with it for hours trying to get things to work correctly and then around 3:00 am just gave up and restored from a backup, reverting the software back to normal.

Several communications with our host throughout the night proved to be unhelpful.

This morning, I wake up and find an email from the host. Apparently, they were upgrading our server at the same time or a little after I did the board software upgrade. They upgraded the SQL and the PHP versions. Apparently, the upgrades that they performed, altered the .htaccess file on our domain, which caused the issue that lead to our outages. Evidently, they have no desire to inform us puny little customers proactively of when an upgrade will occur.

So all along, it was their goof, and was not on our end, though the timing seemed coincidental. I have since restored the system to the newest software version and the board is running smoothly.

If, however, you do find some feature that does not work properly, on any style, please let me know. I do not always check things as thoroughly as you all do.

As well as plugging some security holes, this new software will provide some new features in the area of social networking, bookmarking, tagging and community groups.

Again, I apologize for any inconvenience any of you have experienced last night as a result of the outages. It was necessary to maintain the integrity of the database which holds our posts and member info.

Rest assured, your admin will strive to lead the pack by furnishing you with the most secure, most up to date and feature rich forum software available.