The PAFOA Forum has been upgraded to vBulletin 4

[danp]

I will apologize up front for the brevity of this post, I started the upgrade process at 7:33 am on May 26th and it just finished now at 2:39 am on May 27th, so I've been staring at a terminal for just over 22 straight hours and my brain is fried so we'll do some bullet points:

The good:

• We're now on vBulletin 4.2.2 PL4, the latest supported version of the vB4 series.
• We now have a mobile style which should be automatically applied when you visit using a phone/tablet browser. If not scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and look for the dropdown to choose the style.
• We have gotten out from under our massive technological debt that built up over the past few years and we have a plan to make sure we don't get that far deep again. I think.
• There are probably a lot of new features available to people. If you find one, wield this power nobly.

The bad:

• There is no longer a link between calendar events and discussion threads. This is very unfortunate but was unavoidable.
• We are using the default design for vBulletin 4. I will be reincorporating the PAFOA design as I have time, but I'm really, really tired.
• I am 100% sure there are going to be some funky bugs/quirks that surface over the next few weeks and I plan to organize them here and fix them as quickly as possible.
• There are probably a lot of new features available to people. If you find one, wield this power nobly.

That is all for now, I really, really need to sleep.

Thank you all for your patience in the last 24 hours, and over the many years.

[danp]

Known issues:

Failed Subscriptions
Priority: FIXED
Status: Waiting to see if fix worked
Description: A couple weeks ago when we upgraded from vBulletin 3.7.3 to 3.8.8 a large percentage of purchased subscriptions were not honored. I believe this issued has been fixed with the upgrade to vBulletin 4 and I have queued payment processing between PayPal and PAFOA. If this fails again I will begin the process of manually honoring subscriptions while figuring out what went wrong.
Fix: Starting in vBulletin 3.8 which we recently upgraded to before upgrading to vBulletin 4.2, php5-curl became a required dependency in order to properly communicate with PayPal when it was not previously required. This was missed in the upgrade process which severed communication between PayPal and the forum. This module has since been installed and deployed, communication was verified, and I have queued all outstanding payment notifications for redelivery which appear to be trickling in. It appears that PayPal has re-sent all notifications and everyone who paid for a subscription but didn't receive it over the past few weeks now has it.

Default / Non-Branded Design
Priority: High
Status: FIXED
Description: The templating system between vB3 and vB4 was completely re-vamped and as such the old PAFOA-branded theme didn't work. I recreated all of the functionality of the old theme, but was unable to quickly recreate the look/feel. I will be reimplenting this ASAP.

Classifieds Filter (WTS/WTB/etc.) links do not work
Priority: Medium
Status: Acknowledged
Description: In the classifieds section there are/were links that would narrow the threads in a forum to whether they were WTS, WTB, etc. It appears that the URLs these link to no longer work with vB4. We will need to find their equivalent and update the links.

Broken image on Forum Categories when containing new posts and locked
Priority: Low
Status: Fixed
Description: In a very specific scenario vBulletin references an image that does not exist.

Blank White Browser Pages at :22 After the Hour
Priority: Medium
Status: FIXED
Description:The blank white pages seem to be happening at regular intervals when accessing the Forum in a browser, around 20 to 23 minutes after the hour. Everything is back normal within 2 to 3 minutes.
Comments:

• It's almost as though there's a service on the server that's restarting, probably not Apache, but maybe php, or some other child service; reported by streaker69, others. It did it to me at 1922, 2023, and 2122 on 28 May 15 -- Noah (NZ)
• Verified that a 22 minutes on the hour the app server is running out of child processes, researching fix, may be as simple as increasing the number. -- danp
• Simply increasing php-fpm pm.max_children did not fix, attempting to set a pm.max_requests in case the failure is a vBulletin memory leak. -- dan @ 5/30 10:02AM
• Setting pm.max_requests to 1000 did not work. -- dan @ 5/30 10:28AM
• Latest theory is that this downtime is caused by an vBulletin cleanup job that runs hourly starting at 20 minutes past. Looking at the code changes between v3.8.8 and v4.2.2 of vBulletin they added a new cleanup which reads data from our obscenely large attachment table which may lock the database causing requests to back up and ultimately fail. -- dan @ 5/30 2:30PM
• Theory regarding scheduled task appears to be correct. Task was disabled after the failure that occurred 5/30 @ 2:22 and no further downtimes occurred. The suspect portion of the task was temporarily commented and run manually which did not cause downtime. A ticket will be filed with vBulletin regarding this problem.

[Gunsnwater]

Thank you Dan for all the work and keeping pafoa alive.

[JenniferG]

Looks pretty good. I know how hard it is to do these updates with my Schwinn Bicycle Forum and this forum is much bigger than mine. Good job I'd say.

[tbmatthews82]

Member location doesn't show up by their name anymore... Is that by design? I used to be able to tell which part of the state people were from if they chose to share that info.

[Swamp Fox]

Member location doesn't show up by their name anymore... Is that by design? I used to be able to tell which part of the state people were from if they chose to share that info.

Apparently the only way to view this now is by going to an individual's profile page and clicking on "about me"

[Champagne Lady]

Thanks, Dan. I was surprised when I went to log in as I didn't realize the site was getting updated. My bad for not paying closer attention. It looks very nice. Now please go get some well deserved sleep.

[indianjack]

can"\'t seem to determine what messages I've already read as I could in the old version.
Never mind I got it now.

[danp]

The blank white pages seem to be happening at regular intervals, like around 20 to 23 minutes after the hour and everything is back normal within 2 to 3 minutes. It's almost as though there's a service on the server that's restarting, probably not Apache, but maybe php, or some other child service.

Just verified this. At 7:22PM EST it appears the webserver stopped responding, and eventually returned a blank white page. At 7:25PM EST it returned to normal.

Dan, when you make it back. I've just verified this again in the 8:00 and 9:00 hours. It's going off around 22 minutes and returning around 26 minutes after the hour. Probably something you can track down in the server logs.

OK Sherlock Holmes, this is from the logs:

[29-May-2015 17:27:15] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[29-May-2015 18:22:16] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[29-May-2015 19:22:32] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[29-May-2015 20:22:36] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[29-May-2015 21:22:23] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[29-May-2015 22:22:36] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[29-May-2015 23:22:45] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[30-May-2015 00:22:11] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[30-May-2015 01:22:39] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it
[30-May-2015 02:22:36] WARNING: [pool pafoa-forum] server reached pm.max_children setting (10), consider raising it

I'm going to guess this is not a coincidence!

22 minutes every hour almost down to the second. I'll log this as an acknowledged issue and look into a fix ASAP.

EDIT: Just happened again at 11:22. I'll be deploying a proposed fix before the next failure time.

[ungawa]

Smileys hella gay. And the website is painful to look at.

Dan:

Here is a more comprehensive body of feed back:

http://forum.pafoa.org/showthread.php?t=283293