A couple of hiccups lately.

You may have noticed that the forum on our site has been down several times for short periods.  Here’s what happened.  Firstly, we decided to add a few extra features to it in order to make life simpler for the staff here.  No big deal, right?  We made a copy of the forum, checked everything worked and moved it across – only for it to default to an old design.  It turns out that when you alter files in the admin panel, it doesn’t write them to the style folder but keeps them in a cache file.  Move things around and it goes back to the default rather than what’s in the cache.  This mainly altered the look of the forum, with images reverting back to ones we’d used a year or so ago.  It also caused a few of the plugins we had to throw a fit.  Most of this was behind the scenes and didn’t affect the user experience for anyone but the forum staff.  After a few days, all the kinks were worked out and back to normal.  Then we put something else in that caused all the avatars and uploaded images to disappear.  That one took 7 hours to fix, and turned out to be something in a completely different folder to what we expected.  It’s like finding your car’s brakes don’t work anymore because your horn is faulty.  During that process, I updated some software as part of the diagnosis process and that caused the watermarks to vanish from our gallery.  Luckily this one was an easier fix.  Right now, everything is working fine, the extra stuff we added is integrated and working 100%.  It was also a real learning experience for me.  I have managed to learn more about how the forum software works these past 2 weeks than the previous 4 years we’ve been using it.  So yes, it was stressful for all involved, but at the end of the day it was definitely worth it.  And no more touching any of the files if I can help it from now on.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!