JohnCh

Nothing that glamorous. I edit all of Croc’s communications to ensure they result in neither litigation, public censure, nor involuntary confinement in a foreign country. He is a prolific writer who rarely sleeps, so it keeps me busy. -John

Compared to my real job, this has been kind of relaxing and slow paced -John

As some of you noticed, the site was offline for about 4 hours yesterday. This was not planned and was due to an issue within our vBulletin code. Our new hosting company identified and corrected it, but it confirmed what we have long suspected; there are underlying code issues that have contributed to the interesting "features" we've randomly experienced over the past few years. The good news is the code base is not something moving over on Sunday and we will be starting fresh. The bad news is that because this randomly cropped up, Murphy's Law dictates there is no guarantee a related issue won't arise before Sunday and cause a repeat. Should that occur, and depending on the severity and effort to fix it, we may make the decision to rip off the band-aid and do the upgrade to Invision at that time. If the site does go down for a few hours before Sunday, please check the Twitter feed provided in Post #1 for an update. Thanks, John

I just added an update to the initial post and repeating it here for awareness. The avatar dimensions (called Profile Photo in Invision) are different than on vbulletin and may look strange depending on the shape and resolution of your current avatar. The good news is that you may use a larger image than on the current forum, with max dimensions of 170x170px and up to 490kb. The downside is that the image must be square. If you use a rectangular photo, it will make you crop it by lopping off the long end. Below is a screen of the actual tool so you can more easily see what I mean. If you have time, you might want to play with a new avatar in preparation for Sunday/Monday. Thanks, John

It's a new feature that started cropping up for some of us a couple of weeks ago. Given we're switching forums in a little over a week, there has been no point investigating why it started happening and potentially introducing more problems. I'm looking forward to a fresh start on a less buggy platform. -John

Max, you have PM -John

Is that your Elan? If so, that means there are at least 3 of us on here with yellow FHCs. -John

That's what I meant, hence the term simpletons' machines So to summarize, se7ens are simple, but their owner are complex, and modern Porsches are complex, but their owners are simpletons. Owners of older Porsches, however, are somewhere in between. -John

Based on the other thread about daily drivers, I didn't think any modern car could be called simple. A se7en on the other hand... And Croc, knowing your feelings about Porsches, I think you misread Bill's comment and mentally appended "tons" to the word simple. -John

Almost 500hp, well under 2000lb, and below freezing temperatures. What could possibly go wrong? :jester: Great looking car! -John

Don't. Jinx. It.

Given my involvement, anyone who followed my engine rebuild saga, shouldn't find any of this surprising -John

For those of you keeping score at home, we nearly had a successful migration on Sunday for the first hop to the new hoster. The site started to come back online after ~90 minutes, and was working well, so I attempted to install Invision (the fancy, new forum software platform) on the servers to begin the prep work for the second and final migration. It wouldn't work. Turns out Invision needs PHP 7.1 or later, and we were running PHP 5.6 in our vBulletin installation. Since our version of vBulletin is compatible with PHP 7.1, the simple fix was for our hoster to update our PHP to 7.1. That's when things went sideways and truly bizarre and random issues began to spring up. It turns out that some past customization to our forum was not compatible with PHP 7.1 and it started throwing a tantrum. The fix was to downgrade back to PHP 5.6. The bad news is that we have no idea what is causing the incompatibility, so the original plan of me spending a couple of leisurely weeks preparing the new invision forum for the migration from vBulletin, won't work since I can't install it while we are still running PHP 5.6 (I never thought I would write the letters PHP so many times in a post, but I digress). The new plan is to take down the forum at 7am PT on Sunday, February 14th. As soon as it's down, we'll upgrade PHP to 7.1, I'll install the Invision software, get things as settled as possible, then we'll migrate the data and return with all the existing content (your posts PMs, attachments, etc) on the new forum, ready for you to post at will. Realistically this process will take all day Sunday, but if there are issues, it could bleed into Monday. Although the new forum will be working correctly, some of the improvements we have planned around articles and downloads won't yet be available and will follow in the coming weeks. How does that saying go about the best laid plans of Se7ens and drivers? -John

Wow, I thought this would be the one place where I wouldn't feel like an anachronism, but I was wrong. All the modern conveniences are nice, but for me, they detract from the experience of...well...driving. Even in the slog of commuting, or a long freeway trip, I don't wish to dilute that experience. At some point there will be a corner preceded by a break in traffic. When that happens, I want to be ready. And when that happens, the trip will no longer seem so bad. At least, that's how I view things. My daily drivers depend on the weather, but go between my track prepped '91 Miata with no options other than those supplied by Flyin Miata, and my "luxurious" '95 Porsche 993 C2. Its leather seats, power windows, power door locks, power sunroof, and AC is about all I desire. I also have a beater '06 Outback used for dog runs to the vet, picking up large items from Home Depot, and dealing with snow on those rare occasions it sticks and I really need to be somewhere. Until I bought it, my only vehicle with cupholders was my riding lawnmower (which is still the only one without a clutch). We recently bought my wife a '21 Hyundai Palisade Limited, which is ludicrously feature rich; heated steering wheel, heated and ventilated seats, lane assistance, cameras that display your blind spots in the dash when the turn signal is engaged, heads up navigation, voice control, rear hatch that opens when sensing your presence out back, parking lot sensors, an overhead video of the car generated from the various front & side cameras. The list goes on. I hate to think what it will be like to repair down the road. Gotta love Hyundai's ridiculously long warranty though. Yes, it's a very nice beast of a vehicle; It comforts and cossets, but as my wife recently said, "it almost drives itself." She meant it as a compliment. I considered it a statement of damnation. Now where is that rock I just crawled out from under? -John

That's good :-) This migration (step 1) was to move the existing vBulletin instance to the new Hoster. Step 2 is moving from vBulletin to Invision. We could have simply done both migrations at the same time, but that can introduce issues that are much harder to track down. I'll provide un update on migration #2 and update post 1 with those details later today. Thanks, John

Thanks Steve, and thanks for the content you're providing. The next step is the big one, and the most difficult. New software is purchased, and I'm currently attempting to install it, so I can start the build out process. Once I make sufficient progress in that endeavor, I'll update the final migration date. -John

The Migration has completed! Some of you will be able to access it sooner than others due to DNS replication, but it's already working for me, which is a good sign. If you experience any new problems with the forum, please report them on this thread so we can track them. Thanks, John

Just saw the ebay post. That was anticlimactic :jester: -John

I don't know, we might target that as the first post after the migration completes to give people a reason to keep checking back :jester: -John

Unfortunately, you can't embed Vimeo here. Good news is that the new forum coming in a couple of weeks allows you to easily embed video from all the popular platforms. -John

We have a new plan and timeline. We are moving the current vBulletin forum to the new hoster this Sunday around 10am ET/7am PT. We did work earlier this week to prep the DNS servers to point to the new location. In theory, this work means the forum could be offline for as little as 1-2 hours, but despite those efforts, it could take up to 24 hours for the changes to fully replicate throughout the Internet. Bottom line, even if everything goes smoothly with the actual migration, we still could be offline until Monday morning, so don't start panicking until mid day Monday and check the Twitter account for an update. -John

Embedding the videos from the above post since the hyperlinks aren't working correctly. -John

We’re not selfless, we’re doing this for us too. I want a better, modern forum, integration with social media, and to grow a vibrant community of likeminded individuals who think a se7en is an eminently sensible vehicle. This site should be the locus in North America for those who own or who are considering owning a se7en. Whether new or used. Whether a Westfield, Birkin, Stalker, WCM, Caterham, or any other car true to the Lotus 7 ethos. I want see track days, tours, local get togethers, and for us to collectively corrupt those who have been hesitant to take the plunge. But first I want the better forum and functional spammer control John

We ran into some issues this week when attempting to move a test copy of the current forum to the new hoster. Good news is that they’re sorted and so far the test copy is working correctly. This gives confidence that when we do the first migration hop, things should continue to work as they do now until we make the move from vBulletin to Invision. So functional, but a little buggy 😉. However, we will want to push out the dates again by a few days to finish testing. There is also a chance that the temporary outages described in post #1 may happen during the day rather than overnight. We have a great support person who is incredibly responsive and on top of things. I’d prefer to perform both migrations during his working hours in case there is a problem. I’ll update this thread tomorrow with the new dates and times. -John

Where in Eastern WA are you located? Thanks, John