New Forums Server

[crazy-meiguoren]

I got here through the chinese-forums domain. Haven't checked all the features yet. I missed out on all the excitement a few days ago.

Thank you, Roddy, for all your hard work. There's a lot of work in running a forum. What the members see when they log on is only the tip of the iceberg.

Welcome to the moderation team, Chrix.

Edited January 31, 2010 at 08:12 AM by crazy-meiguoren
remove a repeated sentence.

[skylee]

Could anoyone tell me how I can save the password when I access this site via 64.57.208.244 ?

I used to have my password saved for the Chinews forums (old server). And then I changed to IE8. No problem until the recent change of server. Not sure if it is a Chinese forums issue or IE8 issue. Regardless, would appreciate any helpful advice. Thanks.

BTW, the links of sub-forums still point to the old server, it seems.

Edited February 4, 2010 at 05:06 AM by roddy

[imron]

How many moderators and administrators do we have here anyway?

There are five admin: Roddy, Wushijiao, Gougou, Chrix and myself. There are no defined tasks for each of us, and we all perform general forums administration (moderating posts by new users, moving/merging/deleting posts where necessary etc) depending on our time. Roddy is the head honcho however and ultimately what he says goes. Regarding female administrators, gender is not one of the considerations looked at when choosing someone. At various times in the past a number of female members have been asked if they were interested in the position, but for their own reasons they declined (the same has been true of male users also). As for moderators, I'm not sure of the exact number we have, but it's not many and their moderation responsibilities are usually limited to a particular sub-forum where that member has a keen interest. We've not really tended to use moderators much because there have always been enough admin to handle the forums' moderation needs. Recently however, because a number of admins have been short of time, it made sense to add another, and Chrix got the job for the reasons Roddy listed above.

@skylee, your browser will treat 64.57.208.244 and http://chinese-forums.com differently when remembering the password. If you want the browser to remember your login both via the IP address and the domain name, you will need to log in once to each site and tick the "Remember Me" box for both of them when you do so.

Edited February 4, 2010 at 05:06 AM by roddy

[skylee]

you will need to log in once to each site and tick the "Remember Me" box for both of them when you do so.

Done. But it doesn't seem to work.

[roddy]

If you have another browser it might be worth trying that. Either way, things should be back to normal shortly (although I seem to have spent the entire week saying or thinking this). Beijing Telecom's just updated their servers, so that's both my ISP's up to speed.

As Imron says, five admin members, although Wushijiao retired quite some time ago due to lack of time (frankly given how much he seems to get done I'm not sure how he manages to eat) and I haven't got around to removing his admin status. I think generally the team is highly representative of the membership, as both are excellent.

Had originally planned to be doing the upgrade of the forums software over the weekend of the 6th - ie this coming weekend. However this week has really kind of dragged on and been somewhat disruptive - post numbers and visits are understandably down (although not drastically. It's more like an extra Christmas than anything else.) So I'll maybe not do it next week, but not sure at which point I'll have time after that, so . . . ah, see what happens.

[Meng Lelan]

But what happened to nipponman, wasn't nipponman moderating the 中文角 or maybe the sticky was his job there plus making sure 中文角 wasn't becoming a 英文角。

[imron]

Like I said, I'm not sure of the exact state of the moderators. Way back when a number of people were granted moderator status for some of the sub-forums to help out with moderation duties. Some of them were active, some not so much, and over time that got less and less. Rather than swap moderators Roddy decided to just add a number of admins to take over the main moderating/admin responsibilities. That was when Gougou, Wushijiao and I became admins, although the previous members still retained moderator status (even the inactive ones). Nipponman's moderator status is a hangover from those days, and with the increase in the number of admins doing all the admin work there wasn't really much of a need to replace the moderators when they stopped being active members (an admin being different from a moderator in that they can perform admin across the entire forums, whereas a moderator is typically limited to a given sub-forum. Admins also have some extra powers, but that's basically the gist of it).

The main exception to the moderator situation has been recently, when Extrapages was granted moderator status in the Living in China sub-forum to deal with all the CSC scholarship stuff without needing to bother us each time, Renzhe who was dealing with the First Episode Project and editing in word lists, pictures and summaries, and Chrix, who was given mod status in the Classical Chinese forum, which he was instrumental in getting up and running.

Edited February 1, 2010 at 02:44 AM by imron

[gougou]

When I checked in this morning at work, I didn't get any new posts results yet, but they started appearing sometime during the morning. Was working at home yesterday evening already.

Obligatory prodding: when using the Google search box, I get an error message saying

Warning: chdir() [function.chdir]: No such file or directory (errno 2) in /home/chinesef/public_html/searchresults.php on line 8

[roddy]

Fixed that (I love an easy fix).

[abcdefg]

The new site is now working fine from Kunming. Appreciate the hard work that went into getting things fixed.

Not being able to post or reply to the posts of others the last few days made me realize how important it is that the forum is interactive. Makes it alive instead of dead.

[pancake]

Too bad the DNS is still screwy. I ended up just modifying my /etc/hosts to point chinese-forums.com to the correct IP.

[Don_Horhe]

I can access the new server only via 64.57.208.244, but when clicking on New Posts, or anything else for that matter, I get automatically redirected to www.chinese-forums.com, where the New Server topic doesn't even exist.

Edited February 4, 2010 at 05:07 AM by roddy

[Outofin]

Don_Horhe, I reset (turned off and on) my modem to make it work. I wonder if the modem may have cached websites' IP address. Never mind if you are not using on modem.

[Don_Horhe]

I'm not using a modem, but thanks anyway.

I forgot to mention - the only way which I can get to the new server and actually write this post is via the link to this topic in the notice "Welcome to the new server, and sorry for the delay in getting you here." and then I just browse myself out of it and into the new posts (which still don't show up for me at www.chinese-forums.com).

Edited February 4, 2010 at 05:07 AM by roddy

[imron]

I'm also getting wacky stuff. Perhaps take down the old site and just put up a message so it's obvious when the DNS is stuffed up.

[tooironic]

Yay! Very, very happy we're back online! Now I can finally get my chinese-forums fix. Cheers for all the hard work Roddy and fellow admins! Well done.

[skylee]

It seems that the links on 64.57.208.244 don't work (take you back to the old server).

But the links on 64.57.208.244/forums.php are ok.

Edited February 4, 2010 at 05:07 AM by roddy

[roddy]

Sorry for the lack of updates yesterday.

It became apparent yesterday that something wasn't quite right - some ISPs weren't updating, some that had updated seemed to have rolled back to the old information. A bit of hunting and I found what I think was the problem (error in the DNS SOA record, for those that know what that is - I didn't, until yesterday). I fixed that yesterday afternoon and by the looks of things that information is now taking hold - the number of people on the old server has fallen significantly overnight. It seems some ISPs were able to ignore the issue and get it right, while it meant others preferred to stick to the old info, and some, as far as I could tell, flip-flopped. Made it a bit hard to figure out if things were working or not.

I really can only apologize for the disruption. The original error wasn't mine, but it's quite possibly the kind of thing I should have checked, or at least thought to look into sooner. If I'd known it existed.

[jbradfor]

Not the SOA record??? Roddy, how could you??? You've never been good with authority, have you?

Things were weird for me. The name would work for a while, and then some time later on the exact same computer it would stop working and I would have to use the IP addresses, then the name would work again....

It's been an exciting ride! We should write a soap opera about it.

[roddy]

Yeah, apparently just writing "Me!!!!! Of Course!'' in there isn't correct, it's actually something to do with the authoratitive records for the domain. Who'd've guessed. And the trouble with DNS troubleshooting is that if you make a change you need to wait 24 hours before you can tell if anyone's paid attention