First the good news. We should have a surge of traffic since almost 100 members that haven't been to this new site have reset their password to login.
It has been a long night, yesterday I sent out "please come back" email messages to 10,000 of the registered accounts.
There were a LOT of bounces. Also, that was a bit too big of a chunk of processing for my web hosting to handle at once.
So the site went down, then my mail relay provider (AmazonSES) brought the hammer down and "paused" email sending from the site. So I had just asked 10,000 members to use the Lost Password form to request a new password, but when they tried there was no email sent out to reset their password. 🤬Â
Then, the site suddenly lost a lot of it's formatting. It was tough tracking that down and I couldn't restore from my backups without losing all the records of mail sending during the last 24 hours.
The big part of the bounce problem is from 1. bad (spam) accounts that got registered while the old site was having issues 2. the catsailor users that I migrated along with the catsailor forums, that database turned out to have a high percentage of fake accounts.
I'm working through it now and I'm going to have to be a lot more aggressive on purging member accounts with bad or unreachable (auto reply setup) email addresses. In the middle of the night I paid $119 for a service to pre-check the next 10,000 emails to see if they are reachable. Found about 2,400 were not, I'll have to just delete those accounts since there wouldn't be any way (even if they were legit accounts) for them to reset their password.
Ignore all this, I am just venting to friends, and sleep deprived. Cheers 🍺Â
Thanks Damon for all your hard work and passion keeping this site up!
Lee
Go Damon! As a Hobie 18 with wings sailor in Boulder Colorado, I appreciate all of the work you have done to get this up and running!
🙂
@cmiles3 Welcome Back!
Thank you, Damon, for keeping the faith. Best to you
@tami hey Tami! 👋 Great to hear from you. Where in the world are you these days?
When I click on a link from a search engine to a thread on this site it never opens, it just goes to the home page. Is that fixable?
@tamumpower Unfortunately the previous (20 year old) forum used a completely different url scheme as this one, as did the calendar, and classifieds. Google had hundreds of thousands of url's indexed with the old scheme.
I wasn't able to automatically forward all of those to the equivalent one here. So it will take a while for those old links to drop out of Google and reindex with the new forum url's. That process is well under way, typing this into google gives a sample of the pages currently indexed.
site:thebeachcats.com
If you find particular url's that seem important and have a direct equivalent here I can do a 301 (moved permanently) forward in dns. I just need the old url and the new one.
The old image gallery was another whole problem. Since it couldn't be brought into the structure of everything else, it now exists on separate software and server atÂ
https://archive.thebeachcats.com/pictures/
I was able to save all of the content there but have a lot left to do to make it usable.
Hope that explains the problem.
Interesting. I wonder how long it will take for google to be accurate. In the mean time, what happened to the advanced site search? The only one I see is the simple search on the top right and for me at least it doesn't work.
what happened to the advanced site search? The only one I see is the simple search on the top right and for me at least it doesn't work.
The search isn't everything i want yet but it does work. The way it currently works is you enter your search term(s) into the search box, press enter on your computer keyboard or "go" on your phone keyboard (varies depending on your phone keyboard app). That triggers the initial search and makes available the advanced search option where you can choose options like search titles only or search for post by a particular member.
You can improve the search when using more than one word by using quote marks. See these screenshots from my Android phone doing a quoted search for "hobie 18" in the technical forum.