New forums are now live! For historical purposes we'll keep this page online.

As most of you have undoubtedly noticed, the performance of the forums had degraded significantly in the last several weeks.

On October 22, our vendor Infopop told us that the current issues were due to the gradual increase in usage and that we physically outgrew the dedicated server we purchased less than a year ago. We tried to come to a creative arrangement with them, as the cost of the new hosting solution was far more than we expected or could afford, to no avail. We're now working on a viable alternative to UBB.x, as InfoPop has since cancelled our service contract.

Believe us, we're just as frustrated with the situation as you are. Unfortunately we were caught off guard by our vendor, who did not warn us of the server issues. We are now scrambling to get the forums back online. Please be patient. We'll provide updates on this page as we move forward with a solution.

Updates

11/19 11:45am PST
The new forums are here! You can read the announcement on the new site for details. Happy happy joy joy.

11/18 10:35pm PST
I'm late on my update because we've been working hard on the forums, and they're just about ready to launch! We ran some load testing on the new machine by simulating users hitting the site at approximately 100 requests per second. The forums didn't flinch, but we'll see after real people start hammering on it.

All the old categories were lovingly restored, and we have imported everyone who has ever posted a message to the forums so logins, avatars, and signatures should be ready when you log in. We have also added all the moderators so they can start feeling comfortable with the new forums after we launch.

If we haven't missed anything major, the forums should be available sometime tomorrow (Wednesday).

11/17 4:15pm PST
Since we sorted out how to do the imports, we have decided to launch the entire forums with the previous structure. This will include the entire database of topics from October 2000 to last week.

So far, we have created all of the forum areas, but all the data hasn't been imported (yet). Since some of the sections (Like Getting Started) contains over 150 megabytes of forum data, the import is going slow. Occasionally there is the corrupted record (like the “back in time“ post from 1930), which has required some tweaking to get it in the database.

Otherwise we're making slow but consistent progress.

11/16 10:34am PST
Huzzah! The new forums are installed, connected, and running smoothly. Now the fun begins.

The toughest part ahead of us is rebuilding the new forums to look like the old ones. We need to re-add moderators, create each topic area, and set them with the same permissions as they were before. Fortunately the new forums allow you to copy your settings from one category to another, so that should lessen the load. In the meantime we are running a smaller board on the software and members are hammering on it, trying to find any issues that we didn't notice. However, we're very satisfied and hope to get this running again next week.

11/14 2:55pm PST
The forum server has arrived! We're starting to install the software immediately and will try to get the new machine into production over the weekend. Switching to the new in-house hardware we will recoup the cost of moving off InfoPop in less than 4 months.

Your subscription dollars at work:

• HP Proliant DL360 rack mount server (1U)
• 2.8Ghz Xeon Dual Processor
• 2 Gigs of Memory
• 2 mirrored 36 gig Ultra 320 SCSI drives

As testing goes, we're now satisfied with the linking between the forum software and the geocaching.com accounts. In addition, Elias has been successfully exporting the data from the old forums into the new forums. Not only do the exports look almost exactly like the original, but each user will own their own posts again, along with statistics. However, initially we plan to launch the new forum software first, then add the old forum posts. This will not matter either way, and our motivation is to get the forums up first and “ask questions later.”

11/13 4:20pm PST
Great News!
"What? You fixed the forums?"
No. But I just saved a bundle on my car insurance.
- trippy1976

11/13 3:40pm PST
Everything is moving forward smoothly. We have settled on a PHP and mySql solution for the 1st Generation of the board. We were just encountering too many issues with the M$ SQL port for it to be a viable option.

Folks have been sending suggestions for the future of the Groundspeak forums. The consensus so far is to create a 'blank slate' and start over with posts, moving older topics to an archival site. We'll probably post a poll in the new forums to take the pulse of forum members on this.

Sometimes it's the small nits that really gum up the works. The new boards, for example, have avatars but you have to explicitly define the height and width of each avatar. As a result I have to snag the details from the file before updating the database. Otherwise the avatars will look like they are reflected in funhouse mirrors.

11/12 8:50pm PST
We're moving ahead with the installation of Invision Power Board. We are currently running three boards in our office. One is running with a Microsoft SQL back-end, and the other two are running mySQL (databases). Elias was successfully able to download all the historical posts from the old forum, which is great news, but I don't expect the posts to be up on the new board near-term. Our inital goal is to get the forum running and active, and bring in the historical posts afterwards. Worst case we'll put them in a web archive for reference purposes.

Tomorrow we start work on integrating the accounts with the Geocaching web site and the forums. Because the forums run on a different platform there have been some challenges exporting the account data to the new database. We spent most of today tearing our hair out on one or two sticky issues. 

Over the last two days there has been a surge in the number of geocachers finding caches. Coincidence? ;)

11/11 3:30pm PST:
We received our license to Invision Power Board and have started to install the application on a new dedicated machine. In the meantime, we have some new November desktop wallpaper. In Windows, once it loads right click on the image and choose "Set as desktop background" Enjoy!

Black: 600x800 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
Beige: 600x800 1024x768 1280x1024
Gray: 600x800 1024x768 1280x1024

11/11 11:00am PST:
We have officially given up on the Ubb.x forums. InfoPop has cancelled our account with them and we have 30 days to move our information off our hosted server. As a result we have removed the link here so the traffic will subside enough to retrieve our 3 years of forum posts from the database. At the same time we're continuing to test the Invision Power Board software.

The biggest challenge to forum applications is the merging of login data between the discussion board and the geocaching.com web site. We want to ensure that the usernames are consistent between the two systems. OneCommunity was an excellent feature from InfoPop and the forums themselves will be difficult to duplicate.

11/11 10:30am PST:
We're currently looking at two forum software applications, one of which is Invision Power Board. It looks like a good solution so far. We're currently testing it in-house and may put something in production so we can at least have a skeleton board until we can get something more permanent. If anyone knows of any show stoppers with Invision Power Board, please let us know.