GreekChat will be temporarily offline for a few hours sometime... this week.
 

Just a quick note to everyone...

GC will be offline for a few hours, sometime over the next few days (July 20 ~ July 22), moving to a new webserver and for software upgrades.

When I take the forums offline I'll put up a simple static temp offline page. So if you see something like that you'll know GC will (as long as nothing goes wrong) be running on the new webserver within a few hours after.

I have some family plans on both Saturday & Sunday. But do also plan to get this done if I can squeeze in a handful of uninterrupted hours somewhere those days. Otherwise will be on Monday.

That's pretty much it for now.

Thanks for hanging in there with GreekChat while I continue to work on, rebuild & sort out various tech issues.

Thanks for the warning John. I am excited to see the updates to the board!

Thanks for the heads up. Will it still have the same name, so we’ll know where to find it when it’s back up and running?

Visual updates will also be coming very soon, but not this time. This project involves switching to different server hardware, moving to a different datacenter in a different State along with lots of backend software changes.

If anything is noticeable after these coming changes it will just be with site responsiveness. I'm expecting site speed to improve significantly. However, if the bots that have been hammering GC continue to or increase then I will still have some other work to do to deal with that to get things running faster.

The new server I estimate to be approx 2x the speed/capability of the server that GC is moving from.

Yes, site name & domain name will go unchanged: greekchat.com

I can't wait to see! And also for it to come back--GC is a hard habit to break after 25 years!

THANK YOU so much, John. Your dedication is indeed admirable!

Thank you, John! You’re the BEST! :)

Thank you John!!

I think we ALL appreciate the time & effort you put into GreekChat, John - Thank You!

Appreciate all you do to keep GC running!

Saturday & Sunday I got the new server prepped. Basically reinstalled & reconfigured as per the tech recipe that I've been sorting out over the last few months.

Another few things to do today, then will be moving GC over to the new server, doing another software upgrade, then re-opening the site. That should be before the day is over.

By the way, I don't want to disappoint anyone who may have missed where I posted about it not being a visual upgrade. When GC is back online it will look the same (with this project) but should be running a lot better. Background software & hardware is what will be changing this time around.

What would we do without the classic GC look? Over the years, my kids have said, "Don't go in the bedroom if the screen is glowing periwinkle, Mom is on Greekchat."

Wasn’t there something you were going to do differently? Like, to where only mods and members who bought a coffee would be able to see? It was like a preview or something. Maybe I misread it. I just thought you posted something like that in the coffee thread.

Remember the YELLOW?

Some things haven't gone as quickly as I expected today and did get distracted a bit. So probably will be extending this into tomorrow.

Hmm... maybe we can have the classic GC look still be an option.

Yes, but that's not with this upgrade. When we do the preview that will be when I have GC migrated into a different more modern forum system. So some members and mods have a chance to test that out & get familiar with it before it replaces the old software.

That was way back in the day. The original software that GC ran on, before even what we are using currently.

GC will be going offline tonight approx 1 hour or so after posting this message.

Should have the site back online later tonight or tomorrow if I run into any delays.

Follow https://x.com/greekchat for updates.

:) Thank you for your continued dedication to GreekChat, John.

I underestimated... and ran into some snags.

I'm going to revise this again. Based on where I am right now in the process, I'm going to delay the downtime again until tomorrow.

Been bogged down with firewall settings and email server setup / configurations...

Thank you for all your hard work!

GC's new email sending server is up and running. I noticed that some emails are failing due to the IP address being new in relation to sending emails from GC. So that might cause some email delivery issues for a bit until that clears up. I'll be looking more into that later on. Some of it just takes time for email providers to trust the new IP address.

Wanted to mention this for anyone who uses GC email notifications to know when to check on various discussions here for updates. Email notifications might be a bit unreliable until these issues are sorted out, etc.

So close but yet so far. I kinda want to keep grinding away at it tonight, but it's late enough... I'll pick back up with it tomorrow.

LOL, I should have just put in the initial message "sometime this week" instead of a few days. I updated the thread title to reflect that.

And it probably will end up being tomorrow. ;)

FWIW, it was much faster this morning when logging in. Definitely noticed a difference!

So the past 2 weeks didn't turn out anything like what I expected. I thought I was in the home stretch with only a few hours left to go with all this. But turned out there was still lots for me to do, configure & generally figure out.

Then, when I finally was ready to reopen GC... that's when the bots showed up. Literally, within a minute of reopening there would be hundreds of connections & GC would slow to a crawl. I tested reopening GC a number of times over the past few days. Sometimes it would only be 15 to 20 seconds before the site became unusably slow. I had to keep GC offline just so it was fast enough to work on.

I've been working on this new server (+ software upgrades & other additional tech) project for GC since late March. Probably around 50% of my time. GC is now running on the new server which I have setup way differently than the old server. GC should be significantly improved with this new backend tech stack.

There's still more to come for GC. I have a to-do list a mile long.

GC has been back online for approx 45 minutes and things are looking great so far.

Lots of things on the backend have changed so please let me know if you run into any errors or other issues on the site.

Please also help test things out by clicking around and posting some messages & threads.

YAYYY! Thanks, John!

Thanks so much, John!

What happened to the chit chat thread?

The chit chatting thread isn’t working. My posts aren’t showing up and it’s not showing as one of the threads.

Thanks John!

We're back woo! Thank you John!

And we’re back. Thank you for all your hard work, John!

And we’re back. Thank you for all your hard work, John!

Woohoo! It’s up and running! Yay! You’re the best, John! Thankies! :)

John—THANK YOU for your dedication! It took awhile, but we’re back together again.

We just had a few hours of partial downtime for anyone who was viewing pages faster than around 30 seconds or so.

I was testing out anti-bot rate limiting & had to leave for a bit. Turns out I must have had one of the settings wrong & looks like some images on pages were triggering the anti-bot protections. Will need to do more testing on this to get the settings right.

Those settings are turned off for now, so should be back to normal.