PokerForum.ca will be migrating to a new forum software soon!
MrCaspan
Admin
I just want to give everyone a heads up to some changes that are coming down th line. In the past month I have had to move the entire site to a new hosting provider because the old one got bought out by a new company and in the process took down the sites more times in a month then it been down in 10 years. It took a lot of effort to move everything to the new hosting provider but it was well worth the effort. I tried to not to disrupt the forum but there was a bit of downtime so I am sorry for that. Currently all looks to be working great and is running faster on the new VPS (Virtual Private Server).
Moving the forum did bring up an issue with the software that running the forum on called Vanilla Forums. Vanilla Forums was recently bought by a big company that no longers wants to support the open source community. So what this means is that the community would be responsible for continuing to write for this software for free with no support for the original creators. This basically killed the open source project becuase it had no more funding and now the code has become stale and out of date. Normally this is not a huge issue but our version of Vanilla Fourms was programmed in PHP 7.4 which is now deprechated and no longer supported. You might be asking "well how did I move the site and get it running on 7.4 if it's no longer supported?" Well to be honest ... money! I have to pay each month for the VPS to support an outdated version of PHP. This mainly means I want to get off 7.4 as soon as possible. The problem is Vanilla Forums is no longer being updated or supported and even though there is a version of it that supports PHP 8.0, PHP 8.3 is now out and is the new recomended version to be using. So to me there is no point trying to shoehorn in fixes to the existing forum to get it working on an already old version of PHP.
All this to say that I have had to look for new forum software! So far I have landed on Flarum as it seems to be the easiest way to transfer to from Vanilla as they follow a new way of storing data for forums. We might loose some minor data in the process, for instance "liked posts or comments" will not transfer to the new forum. WHile this si usefull data it's not as mission critical as things like posts,attachments and avatars.
Please read and add to this post if you would like to login to the new test forum to play around and post any questions you might have:
https://pokerforum.ca/discussion/35861/new-site-feedback
Moving the forum did bring up an issue with the software that running the forum on called Vanilla Forums. Vanilla Forums was recently bought by a big company that no longers wants to support the open source community. So what this means is that the community would be responsible for continuing to write for this software for free with no support for the original creators. This basically killed the open source project becuase it had no more funding and now the code has become stale and out of date. Normally this is not a huge issue but our version of Vanilla Fourms was programmed in PHP 7.4 which is now deprechated and no longer supported. You might be asking "well how did I move the site and get it running on 7.4 if it's no longer supported?" Well to be honest ... money! I have to pay each month for the VPS to support an outdated version of PHP. This mainly means I want to get off 7.4 as soon as possible. The problem is Vanilla Forums is no longer being updated or supported and even though there is a version of it that supports PHP 8.0, PHP 8.3 is now out and is the new recomended version to be using. So to me there is no point trying to shoehorn in fixes to the existing forum to get it working on an already old version of PHP.
All this to say that I have had to look for new forum software! So far I have landed on Flarum as it seems to be the easiest way to transfer to from Vanilla as they follow a new way of storing data for forums. We might loose some minor data in the process, for instance "liked posts or comments" will not transfer to the new forum. WHile this si usefull data it's not as mission critical as things like posts,attachments and avatars.
Please read and add to this post if you would like to login to the new test forum to play around and post any questions you might have:
https://pokerforum.ca/discussion/35861/new-site-feedback
This discussion has been closed.