** Website Upgrade Issues!

[Ted Craven]

On Monday Oct 24 around 11am PT / 2pm ET the website will go down so that the Bulletin Board software can be upgraded.

The downtime is estimated to be from 3-5 hours. When the site goes back up again, it will look a bit different though all the Forums should still be there, all posts, all Sartin Library items (Follow Ups, videos, manuals, etc). It will take me a little time after that to make changes to the visual appearance, including colour schemes and logos.

I'm sure with a bit of patience and tinkering, everyone will be able to find their stuff!

I hope this upgrade will set us up for a number of years to come, also provide several new options for organizing and publishing Sartin-related information and education.

Good luck to us!

Ted

[stormbringer]

You are doing all this on your own. Thank you very much for all of this stuff
All of your hard work is so greatly appreciated by me!!

K.C.

[Ted Craven]

Just a reminder -- the website will be going down today around 11am PT / 2pm ET for a major upgrade.

Presuming all goes well, we'll be back in business later this afternoon!

Ted

[Ted Craven]

The site upgrade did not happen today. Technical issues during the process required that we pause and try again tomorrow.

The site will go down again sometime tomorrow morning, possibly with little notice. Then the upgrade will start again, for a few hours.

Ted

[Ted Craven]

Hello Everyone -- following most of this past week of the original website being out of commission (replaced by an upgraded though severely DEGRADED response) website - this original site is now back in action!

However, I cannot say how many days this will last because the original reason forcing me to upgrade was a change by the server host that will soon cause the old Forum software not to work. This change is still immanent, possibly by the end of October (possibly today Oct 28!).

I am working on resolving problems with the NEW Forum software (which was sooo slow this past week), to try to migrate to that for a permanent solution.

Then back to horse racing ...!

Thank you everyone for bearing with over the past week! I am very sorry for this disruption and will do my best to make things stable as soon as possible.

Ted

[Ted Craven]

This should be the final info for a while on this website upgrade -

We will be continuing with the original website appearance (this one!) for a while, likely through some time next year. I like the appearance and features of this format of the site better than the (postponed) upgrade. Inevitably, we'll have to upgrade the site but it looks like I'll have more time to plan for it.

For the non-technically minded - feel free to stop reading now
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To recap - the web host (providers of the online server for paceandcap.com) required that the server language PHP be upgraded by the end of October - though this forced upgrade has now been deferred until next year (so they say). However, the current site (this older vBulletin Forum software) does not work at all with that upgraded PHP version - hence the need to upgrade to the most current vBulletin Forum software. Initial tests this week ran into severe server degradation when using that new Forum software (half a minute waits to load any page, or just an error message - anyway REAL BAD).

And it has been a real trial working with 2 sets of technical support staff to debug that problem (each side sometimes saying it's the other side's responsibility for the problem, responding only once a day by email and in the middle of the night ...). I believe I now have a handle on why the new Forum software ran so slowly, but I will have to do some debugging tests over the coming weeks to get it right - though nothing before Breeders' Cup!

For now - we're back where we were before with this long-familiar and reliable Sartin website and resources. I apologize for the past week of interruptions and frustration. I will do my very best to minimize that going forward, having learned a few tricks for next time.

Happy handicapping and wagering to everyone!

Ted

[CheckMark]

Thank you Ted for the help! I appreciate you big time!

Great that this site will stay for a little bit longer

[Ted Craven]

Folks - I will be taking the site down again sometime Monday Nov 7 for a few hours to continue the upgrade. In all cases, I expect to either succeed in rolling forward to the new version of the vBulletin Forum software, OR - reinstate the existing version without the extended downtime we had recently.

Thank you all for your understanding!

Ted

[cratman]

Originally Posted by Ted Craven

Folks - I will be taking the site down again sometime Monday Nov 7 for a few hours to continue the upgrade. In all cases, I expect to either succeed in rolling forward to the new version of the vBulletin Forum software, OR - reinstate the existing version without the extended downtime we had recently.

Thank you all for your understanding!

Ted

Thanks for your work on this.

[Ted Craven]

I need to take the site down for a few hours on Tuesday Nov 8 for further tests.

Ted