Archive of Status Updates From the Great KarateForums.com Migration of 2024

[Patrick]

I thought it would be fun to have an archive of these somewhere! Here is what was written while we were doing the migration:

KarateForums.com is currently offline for migration to new community software. This has been in the planning stages for years! Updates from Patrick will be shared here, in reverse chronological order. Thank you for your patience and understanding. All times listed are the Pacific Time (UTC -7).

Monday, September 9, 2024

2:56pm: I have made it through the settings. There will definitely be things to set up and tweak over the coming weeks and months. There will be plenty of things that are a little off. A dead link here, a portion of text that no longer represents how the software looks. But we'll get there. The important thing is that the future of the community is more secure, that we are in a position to improve, and that it works. With that said, great news! I can now begin to bring the community back online. It'll come online for different people, but when it happens for you, it'll be clear! Thank you for your patience and your support of KarateForums.com.

11:26am: I'm about to jump back in again. As we are now in the normal Monday through Friday routine, my day is interrupted constantly by my 2-year-old, but I'll be dedicating as much time as I can to getting this done in between normal household tasks.

Sunday, September 8, 2024

9:20pm: Please excuse my silence. I write to you from under a pile of options and settings. We've made a bunch of progress today, but I need to stop for the night. In the morning, back at the start of the week, I have some things to attend to, but then I'll be back at it. We are at the stage where there is nothing technical stopping us: The migration was a success! Now, it is simply the slog through configuration and customization to make sure the experiences matches with what you are used to at KarateForums.com. I don't want to launch with weird new things or features that make no sense. But as I look at what remains, it is certainly *possible* we could launch toward the end of the day on Monday. I am thinking Tuesday is the end point, no matter what. But I don't want to make any specific promises. Talk soon.

2:31pm: Alright folks. Things are moving along well. We are now at the point I teased this morning: Me vs. hundreds of pages of settings. Much of the experience on KarateForums.com is governed by settings. How should a new account be confirmed? When can a member send private messages? What happens if a member triggers the word censor? What rank image should be displayed? What should happen when a YouTube link is posted? Should it be embedded? And so on and so forth. I'm not exactly sure how long this is going to take, but I'm about to dive in.

1:01pm: Just another cryptic update here! We've accepted the reality on those page links, and will fallback to redirecting them to the first page. We're now working through those version upgrades that I mentioned in the last update.

8:31am: My developer friend that is helping me is on Central Time, so he starts a bit earlier than me and has already began for today to try to tackle that issue with thread pages and how the old links will work. If we can get that sorted, we need to update our new community software to a specific version, because it is the last version for our current version of PHP, a scripting language that powers the software. If that works well, we will then bring both the community software and PHP to to their most current versions. If that works, I'll test to see if passwords appear to be working, which will be a big moment. The last big thing will be me going through literally hundreds of pages of settings to ensure everything is set up. More on that later.

Saturday, September 7, 2024

8:11pm: Whew, so the theme is done. I also discovered a separate issue. We want to redirect all of the old links to forum threads so that they will still work, even on our new software. But the code that we have doesn't cover the second, third, fourth, and subsequent pages of a thread. Which isn't necessarily something that would stop me, but is not ideal, so we need to tackle that. Work is stopping for now, and will resume in the morning. Given where we are, if things go smoothly, and we're able to reach the end, it is difficult for me to see us launching before Monday. But we'll see how it goes. Good night.

5:19pm: For theming, we have run into an issue where all of the colors that were selected (it's about 100) did not import. That means that I'll need to copy and paste color codes into the right fields manually. It's the difference between, say, 5 minutes, and 90 minutes. But here we go.

3:47pm: We figured out what was happening, and all of that is now sorted. It was a bit of a time suck, but I wanted to take a pause here to provide an update before I jumped into theming. That's what I am heading to do now. Fingers crossed!

1:33pm: We have hit an unexpected snag in the formatting of quotes in posts. This probably sounds silly, but this is an example of the minutae we've had to address through testing. We thought we had it sorted, and we did for multiple test runs, but for some reason, the methods we used in the last test run are now failing. It is sort of a perfectionist pursuit, as the impact is only the spacing between the end of the quote box and the next line of text, but we had it right, and that's frustrating. But we are trying to troubleshoot it.

7:41am: Today, we'll be starting at around 10am. The biggest potential time blocker today is customizing the design of the software. I have already done a lot of that work, so it essentially just needs to be imported but the last time we did that in testing, there was still some additional work required to have the software recognize all of the customizations. But it could also be a simple process, so let's hope for that one.

Friday, September 6, 2024

10:11pm: Work has completed for the night. It appears that we were able to successfully import the data into our new community software. We're starting with an older version before we move to the latest version, for some specific reasons, but we're in good shape. Overnight, and perhaps into tomorrow, there will be some background processes running to parse through the posts and profiles, to ensure they are displayed correctly in the new software. But that won't stop us from otherwise making progress.

6:52pm: We successfully navigated the previously mentioned snags. It did slow our progress a bit, but were able to perform some of the tweaks needed to optimize the appearance of content in the community and ensure all profile data was correctly captured. We are still stuck in the intermediary application at the moment, but after we address one last annoyance, our next step will be to bring the data into the software we plan to use on the community. Thank you for your patience.

2:21pm: It appears that the data migration into the intermediary application was successful, but we're progressing slowly due to some random snags. The good news is that none of the snags are actually tied to the migration itself - more to do with web hosting issues and similar.

7:48am: Work has already started this morning. After migrating to the intermediary application I mentioned in the last update, we'll need to make a series of changes to address random quirks that have been introduced by our current software. The goal is to ensure that all posts display on the new site in the most attractive format - in the matter they should. By default, they have extra line breaks, broken links, etc. But with a handful of fixes, everything will look great.

Thursday, September 5, 2024

10:15pm: We have completed work for the night. Everything that has been done so far has been focused on making tweaks to our current, old software to ensure that the data can be completely and corrected imported into our new software. In the morning, we will begin the process of importing that data. This will involve first importing it into an intermediary application through which we can then import it into our new software. Wish us luck!

7:18pm: Our community has been taken offline for migration.

[bushido_man96]

I did check in on the migration a few times while waiting.  Thanks for taking the time to keep up all informed on the progress.  It may seem like a little thing, but it is appreciated.

[Patrick]

Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you saying that.

[sensei8]

I read them all because the information/updates are very important to me. You and your team worked very hard and long hours to get KF where it is right now, and while you may do not have another 23 years in you, my/our gratitude will never be taken lightly, and these are not idle words.

 

Edited September 12 by sensei8

[Patrick]

Thanks Bob!