Event Calguns.net Database Backup Date set for 4/16

[D00DST3R]

I’m glad you saw that feature. Pretty soon I’ll be implementing an event system. I’ll separate it by region but basically a sign up system for classes happening in different regions.

I think that’ll be another way to share that’s more than a meme, though I love good memes, that’s functional. It should help promote different groups as well but I will have to come up with a vetting process.

After that more refinement in different existing areas. Onboarding is still proving challenging. No matter how many banners, messages, etc I put, there’s still people that create listings in the forums. I also have to develop a process to identify and remove those quickly and update the user for more consistency in the marketplace. One thing that bugged me at CG was the lack of consistency, but def don’t want to over moderate too.

It's not about over-moderating but keeping things organized and easily accessible for everyone. Clearly with the all banners, messages and even replies to posts/listings, people (not all) are either not caring or just don't read and assume this is where their post goes as they did on calguns.

 

[SpeedRacer]

The estimated downtime is 2-3 days
Now entering Day 5

 

[dbress]

The estimated downtime is 2-3 days
Now entering Day 5

and counting, hopefully tonight

 

[ikeo1]

and counting, hopefully tonight

It’s doubtful. There hasn’t been a change in the error code. Unless the decide to roll back.

Looks like an update came through.

 

[dbress]

I think they need to roll it back and figure this bags out and try again at a later date

 

[ikeo1]

I think they need to roll it back and figure this bags out and try again at a later date

According to the progress report it’s just transforming the data. They’ll have to validate after the conversion completes. They really should’ve done a test run first vs this 5 day downtime and left the forum up in read only format. They really didn’t have to do it this way.

Also notice no mention of how many % complete. But, I will say, it’ll get completed. Now I’m not so concerned since the staff is just letting it chug away and they don’t really seem worried about the downtime. Lol. In which case, more people will continue to find this site.

 

[yatzooa]

There's something wrong with your poll. I can only see three options.
I can't see the option that says, "I quit caring a long time ago."

Almost had me there

 

[DDM4556]

It’s doubtful. There hasn’t been a change in the error code. Unless the decide to roll back.

Looks like an update came through.

View attachment 949

Thank you for the update.

 

[ikeo1]

It's not about over-moderating but keeping things organized and easily accessible for everyone. Clearly with the all banners, messages and even replies to posts/listings, people (not all) are either not caring or just don't read and assume this is where their post goes as they did on calguns.

I’ve implemented a new process that requires users to read the New Users Guide prior to being able to open the Marketplace.

This looks like it’s helping consistency quite a bit. I’ve also auto tagged listings so I can identify listings at a glance and save time. It was becoming a chore. I don’t like a lot spending time moderating. I’d prefer to build more features out.

The events feature will be the last addition for awhile. Then we’ll move into populating the review section and instructions how to crowd source that.

In the review section, I think what will be fun is to “Review/Rate” your firearm. So as you buy, you can give it a ️ rating and list pros and cons.

That along with kit will add another dynamic to the site. Events to learn via class or competition and use your firearm. A review when you test it. A classifieds system to rotate equipment if you wish. A forum to discuss with others. No off topics.

 

[ikeo1]

It’s doubtful. There hasn’t been a change in the error code. Unless the decide to roll back.

Looks like an update came through.

View attachment 949

One thing I will say about the update is that it’s taking awhile because of the schema transformation as I mentioned before, it’s slow because MySQL is single threaded. Meaning no matter how many cores you have it only uses 1 core to process the data. Given there’s 24 million posts, those stupid “bump” posts are prolonging the upgrade. This is also a major reason why here we don’t do that. It’s extra data.

Also, we’ll eventually put time limits in between bumps. Once every 24 hrs will be reserved for Supporters who help pay for the sites costs.

 

[SpeedRacer]

Day 6 and counting......just saying

 

[dbress]

Snooze sleep

 

[DB>)>]

I have a strong suspicion that along with the aged infrastructure, there was also infected code (based upon a posting of some cide they were dealing with, with a lot of links in Farsi, apparently used to generate cliks on gambling sites). Since they are 4 days past their initial "estimate" for being back up again (19th-23rd).... things cannot be good with the transition. There should have been some sort of backup plan that kept at least a semi-functional site up and online, this represents a horrible loss (and hopefully a temporary one...) to the CA 2A community, and the 2A community in general, we should all be sending good vibes and whatever else their way, that they can return, even if it's running rough....

 

[SpeedRacer]

Day 7 and counting
even on the slowest days calguns.net is better than no calguns.net

 

[ikeo1]

Day 7 and counting
even on the slowest days calguns.net is better than no calguns.net

I’m pretty sure they’ll come back online. Support gave no indication of data corruption. The issue with the hacking is real. I saw in early February or something their website was taken over so a backdoor was in. With cloud they’ll have a team to handle it and vulnerabilities should be patched up once they upgrade. I’m surprised they never got hacked earlier. Also surprised it was once, the resolution was just to restart the server, which would mean the vulnerability still exists.

I have less concern/sympathy. To me, CG collected funds while ignoring the people and the site. The updates were trivial at the time and I’ve seen posts postponing upgrades time after time, while CG collected $. In the business world that’s completely unacceptable. Now he’s handing it off to another company for someone else to fix so he can go back to collecting. CG didn’t listen to many people advising the proper path. During my research, I found several threads throughout the years of people who cared so much about the site being ignored who were trying to help with various resolutions.

This is one of the drivers behind creating the site when I did. It was really interesting to discover. CG literally has not changed in 10 years.

I hate to say it but, why did this site get the way it is so fast? I listened to everything they told CG to do and implemented it. Everything everyone complained about was written down. Between Reddit and the posts on CG, there was literally a roadmap to fix CG. Otherwise I had 82 posts since 2012, I knew/know very little about the community, but after reading it was abundantly clear the passion of the community was being neglected, which was something I decided to act on and invest in.

 

[Chupacabra]

@DB>)> I also remember the post about the hidden text or code in Farsi. Who knows what else is buried in the site that was missed.

Since you mentioned it @ikeo1, I have little sympathy for the old .net site because the head janitor continuously ignored users' feedback to improve it. The problems the site is experiencing are due to greed. I hope this new site thrives and eclipses the old one.

 

[DB>)>]

I'm quite sure there was malicious code causing issues... and it may well have turned conversion into an endless task, just as how the site was having random lags and failure to display pages, as though something was running and consuming resources that should not have been. It's tough keeping a server exposed to the internet ssecure - so many scumbags out there! One must be constantly on the lookout for hacking attempts!

IIRC Kes was a caregiver for an aging parent... that's a brutally difficult full time job, one which tends to make it difficult to keep other things caught up. And with the way everything was during 'rona and the still dysfunctional way everything seems to be nowdays, adding a glitchy, stubborn server to the mix would such even harder...

I certainly hope CalGuns can be reanimated, and this site too can thrive... we need all the "community" we can get.... I mean it's not like we're paranoid, certain types ARE out to get us!

 

[ikeo1]

I'm quite sure there was malicious code causing issues... and it may well have turned conversion into an endless task, just as how the site was having random lags and failure to display pages, as though something was running and consuming resources that should not have been.

It’s not that, as mentioned, I do this for a living. The update doesn’t say there’s an issue with data corruption. They are migrating from one database structure to the current one which is 10 years old. The software they’re using is single threaded meaning it processes post by post. Those “bump” posts are what’s slowing down the transactions and the reason why we avoid that here.

The software wasn’t updated since 2017 with EOL support

vBulletin 3.X End of Life - vBulletin Community Forum

The vBulletin 3.X software is considered to be End of Life software. While we will strive to support the latest version, we do not foresee any further development of the series.

forum.vbulletin.com

This was announced in 2010. They talked about upgrades since 2013-2016.

The people I have empathy for are the people that paid for lifetime memberships and donated money but as a professional in the space, it was pure neglect. I operate extremely large websites for a living. The last system I was responsible for was serving 200 million messages a second, we migrated with next to no downtime in real time.

The infrastructure was not antiquated. In January 2023 they migrated from GeoVario to Dreamhost on new hardware. If they were on VPS that would explain the slowdown which is even cheaper than dedicated.

Fully Managed Dedicated Server Hosting - DreamHost

Dedicated server hosting with 100% guaranteed network uptime. Managed servers with unlimited bandwidth, 24/7 tech support and up to 2 TB of storage.

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I’m sorry but I just don’t buy it that CG tried very hard. This site was built while I was in the hospital cafe waiting for my own parent to get treatment over 12 weeks. I understand the loyalty and commitment but it really seems to me that there was little to no effort try to improve things. Which was why I felt like I could do better, faster.

That all said, the website will comeback online. I’m pretty certain it will and it’ll be updated. But in any organization, the lack of communication shows a lack of respect to its constituents. How many updates have they given? 1, literally 1 since this all started a week ago. In my line of work, we update every 15 minutes internally and every time we know something for public consumption.

Migration Update

Migration Update

www.calguns.org

 

[DB>)>]

ON a visit to the JPL open house, there was at least one computer in their main control room running an expired licence Win95, this was a few years ago, but well past W95 EOL.... I myself run older versions of office, 2016 and even 2007.... sometimes ya just use what ya got since it's familiar, not saying it's a GOOD plan, but it is what it is.

On the flip side, I've been having lots of issues of late with all the "push" updates on my daliy driver system - bugs that go away and come back, random lockups from short ones to complete system lockup, certain sites that have bad code that just fails randomly.... so "up to date" isn't always all it's cracked up to be. My #1 son is in IT as well, we've seen a lot of "interesting" tech issues over the years!

I appreciate the work you're doing, so far so good, and I'm sure it will only get better - remember you won't make everyone happy all the time, and it sounds like you've got a lot of bells, whistles, and buttons to "tune", but it's awesome someone is trying to provide another 2A venue!

 

[ikeo1]

I appreciate the work you're doing, so far so good, and I'm sure it will only get better - remember you won't make everyone happy all the time, and it sounds like you've got a lot of bells, whistles, and buttons to "tune", but it's awesome someone is trying to provide another 2A venue!

Ultimately, this is what it’s all about, there’s more that can be done and I think it’s good to have both platforms. We will offer different things and people can bounce back and forth. I also think it’s a good thing that they went to cloud given the hands off approach. The only issue with that is the limitations of the cloud version. Aside from that I think CG itself was always a valuable tool, I just wish the site owner valued it as much as all of us. Though now, as another venue, all of your input is welcome and you are very correct. There’s no way I can please everyone, but I’ll ask for concensus from trusted members to aide in decisions. There’s lots of lessons from this to learn from.