What's going to happen to our Forums in the move?

[fesworks]

Complete wipe or complete migration?

or some combination or other thing?

[Xepher]

Not sure what you mean by "our" forums... These here, or something you've got on your own site? Should both be similar though. I'm not erasing anything, but just copying stuff to a new server. It'll all be locked for a few hours while I copy stuff (to prevent changes halfway through) but should be just the same on the other side. There may be a few small glitches if you have your own forums, since you'll have a new password, you may have to edit the config to use the new database password, and possibly the new database version (moving up to mysql 5.) No data is going to be lost though. Email is really the only thing that's getting a deep probe, as it were. Since the new system doesn't use any of the same formats for storage, those few people who asked their email to be moved are going to have me manually converting their email boxes to the new format, and there's the possibility that some minor stuff can get corrupted... mostly the dates/times may be changed a bit. Nothing major, but the sent/received times may be swapped with each other on some messages. Usually those are only a minute or so apart, so it shouldn't really matter.

[fesworks]

Yea, I have a forum on my account. That is what I was curious about. I'll put a warning up in my forums and warn of a potential lock down and wipe (worst case scenerio if I can't get it all working). Thanks

[Xepher]

Nothing is getting wiped. Let's be clear on that.

I'm dumping everyone's database into a file, then dumping that file into the database on the new system. I'm keeping full/exact backups of the old system, so if something IS wrong, I can redo the import again until it's correct. Worst case scenario is some issues with sort-order based on language. The new system is defaulting to UTF-8 for everything, whereas the current system is (for some reason I never figured out) using case-insensitive Swedish. For any data in the latin-1 character set, it shouldn't change anything, but if you happen to have other character sets in your data, AND you're relying on the default sort order, things may change around. Really, this shouldn't be an issue for anyone except people who wrote their own code AND aren't using latin-1 characters (e.g. russian or asian characters.)

As for the lock, that'll only be at the server move, and probably only for a few hours. You'll see a notice here when I ship the server, and probably another once I've got it online. Only then will it be locked while I physically copy stuff over. People visiting any site here will see a big notice saying exactly what's going on.

[Databits]

Careful with MySQL database dumps. It's got a nasty habit (though be it very stupid) of being able to do a data dump that it can't actually import.

[Xepher]

Will do... there's a couple of formatting options for it that usually fix that. And, failing that, "I know regular expressions!"

Also, as I mentioned, I'm keeping all the original stuff so if it screws up, I can redo it until it works.