PLEASE READ: Board upgrade (complete!) + minor site changes

Post by **allegrita** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 1:54 am

Hi Moonlightaholics,

If all goes as planned, we will be closing this board this Saturday morning, January 24, 2015, in order to upgrade the board software. This is a major upgrade, so it may take the whole weekend.

If you haven't yet registered at the Moonlightaholics Motel, please do so soon! During the time we are working on the board upgrade, we might not have time to process registrations at the Motel, so you might want to try logging in over there before we shut down, so that we can help you with any problems.

Here's the address of the Motel: http://www.moonlightaholicsmotel.com

As soon as we finish with some preliminary work, we'll update this thread to confirm the date that the board will be shut down.

Thanks!

Your MLA Admin/Mod Team

(Edited to change title of the thread)

Post by **allegrita** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 2:58 am

Hi again, Moonlightaholics,

Well, after doing a test upgrade on a small forum we own for testing purposes, our interest in jumping up to the "latest and greatest" version is sharply diminished.

Unfortunately, if we do the major upgrade (going from version 3.0.x of phpBB to version 3.1.x), we will lose a lot of wonderful things we love--at least for a while, as we try to figure out how to make the new version do them, which appears to involve hand-coding a bunch of stuff that was previously easy to do through the admin control panel.

As an example, we would lose the following cool (and previously relatively easy to do) things:

- the ability to easily change our forum's site banners
- the subsilver2 style (and, in fact, every style except for Prosilver, which I personally happen to hate with a passion

)
- our nifty "Gallery" buttons in the header section of the board
- the "Active Topics" link at the top of every page, which is available in subsilver2 but not in Prosilver

Therefore, we have decided to just upgrade our board to the highest version of 3.0.x, which will hopefully fix a few buggy things and not mess up the things we like.

This isn't a permanent solution, but we are hoping the tech-geek folks at phpBB will solve a bunch of the big issues in another upgrade sometime soon--or create some tutorials for us less technical types--so that we don't get stuck having to learn how to write php code just to make things work the way they used to.

We are still planning to close the board Saturday (that's tomorrow) morning around 8am Pacific time. Everyone is welcome to visit the Motel while MLA is down, so please do a test login at http://www.moonlightaholicsmotel.com to be sure you still remember your password, etc.! (For our new members, the Motel is a separate forum, so you will need to register there as well.)

Thanks for your patience!

Your MLA Admin/Mod Team

r1015bill · Post by **r1015bill** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 4:48 am

Good Luck, Mods!

Post by **Lilly** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 4:53 am

Thanks so much, Rhonda!

I see you've already helped to spruce up the Motel a bit.

HotMicks · Post by **HotMicks** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 7:25 am

You can do it!

(

)

Hope all goes well.

francis · Post by **francis** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 10:15 am

I would hate to lose the Active Topics button. So I applaud you for not jumping on the upgrade wagon without consideration.

Post by **allegrita** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 7:21 pm

Thanks so much, everyone, for your good wishes!

We're happy to say that the board upgrade went well, and everything seems to be working very well. Unfortunately, we did lose one of our older skins (styles), called Avalon Green, but thank goodness, it was not used by many people.

In addition to the upgrade, we made a few minor changes to the board:

- We rearranged our main forum page slightly, to move lesser-used forums closer to the bottom of the list.

- We renamed "Chez Fleur and Grace" to be "Chez la Vie". This was done because the forum name makes no sense to anybody who wasn't here at the very beginning, when our founder Phoenix created the forum as a joke on our beloved Fleur de Lisa and wpgrace, who were, shall we say, a bit bouncy in the early days.

The new name reflects the spirit of fun embodied without the confusing, out of date in-joke.

- In the same vein (pardon the pun), we renamed a couple of threads in that forum to remove the names. Grace and Fleur's healthy kitchen is now The Chez Healthy Kitchen, and Fleur and Grace's OTHER Kitchen is now The Chez Indulgent Kitchen.

- We've added a new project, which we hope you'll help with-- we'd like to compile a list of the lyrics to all the Moonlight songs. Check it out here: http://www.moonlightaholics.com/viewtop ... 53&t=11840

Thanks for your patience while we did our maintenance!

Your MLA Admin/Mod Team

francis · Post by **francis** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 9:14 pm

You ask what my mood is at this news? Just look at the smilies above.

I would love to have the lyrics of the songs available. That's a great idea.

Congrats on the smooth transition!

Post by **Lilly** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 9:34 pm

Thanks so much, francis!

kath40 · Post by **kath40** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 10:55 pm

WOW! That was fast I'm glad things went well. Thanks for keeping our ML home in tip top shape

r1015bill · Post by **r1015bill** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 1:05 am

Congratulations! I clicked my bookmark out of habit and immediately thought "Oh, that won't be there yet".

Very pleasant surprise to find everyone back!

Post by **Lilly** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 1:29 am

Thanks, Kath and Rhonda!

Glad to see you both back.

jmc · Post by **jmc** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 4:21 am

That was fast. By the time I checked into the motel, it was all over!

Missed the heated pool again.

Post by **allegrita** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 5:47 am

Well, darn it!

Tell you what... sometimes the vamps sneak over there for a little R&R. So maybe, if you hang around a bit, they'll join you in the pool.

Thanks, everyone, for all the support and nice comments.

We're happy to be back so fast, too!

MoonMarg · Post by **MoonMarg** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 1:29 pm

glad it all went well!

Moonlightaholics

Moonlightaholics