[Notice] Board upgrade

This is the first proper heads up that we're going to be upgrading the board software probably in June or July if the stars align properly (and if not I'm sure we have the odd captain around to give them a nudge).

The actual upgrade is quite a major undertaking and the board will be down for 24-48 hours whilst the work is completed, so please bear with us when it's actually happening.

All your details, posts, conversations, etc will be preserved along with your existing password etc.

There will no doubt be some teething issues and we'll have a dedicated forum for posting snagging issues in so they can be addressed properly.

I'm sure the upgrade will disgust some members and be welcomed by others, however we are overdue and it needs to happen. Personally I think the functionality is much improved on the new branch of software so hopefully overall a positive change. We're broadly keeping the themes/styles we currently have, within the new templates, they will no doubt require a little more work as we settle into them (they are not 100% identical!), so again please bear with us as they are refined over the first few months.

I'd ask you to check :

1. That the email address associated with your account is current and one you can access.
2. That you know your password and if you don't you set it to something you do know!

Since you're going to have to log back in after the upgrade.

We'll notify you when we're a week or so out from the upgrade and have narrowed down a date.

I'm currently working towards doing the upgrade either in the week starting the 17th June or the week starting the 24th June. We're in our final week or so of beta testing things.

As mentioned please ensure you know your login details ahead of this time and your email address is a valid one.

The board will be out of commission for a good while as many steps of the upgrade take a few hours to process the data. We'll start around 0900 UTC and we'll finish when we finish, best case that same day, worst case we'll pick up the following day and finish the final steps. We'll have a status page up that you can see progress on. We'll all really appreciate your patience during the upgrade.

Since I posted it on another thread I wanted to clarify all my mumbling about emails and so forth! I believe everyone should fall into one of the following three categories. Hopefully with 99% of you in category one ...

1. If you know your username/password and your email address is up to date then nothing needs doing. You'll be good to go. After the upgrade just log in as normal if you find yourself logged out. All password hashes will have been migrated to the newer version of the software so your existing password will work.

2. If you know your username/password, but your email address is out of date then I would advise updating your email address to one you currently use. However since you know your username/password it's not strictly needed, you will still be able to login after the upgrade. However if you ever have to recover your account it's the email we'll need to contact so it's no bad thing for it to be up to date!

3. If your email address is out of date and no longer one you can access AND you don't know your password - so you're here logged in solely because you have not logged out in a long time! Then I would suggest PMing me now to resolve things. Because you need your password to change your email yourself and if you're email is out of date then you can't use the lost-password feature either. So you will need me to update the email address manually.

Just to confirm I'm going to do the upgrade on the 17th June 2024 starting in the morning UK (GMT+1/UTC+1/BST) time. That will probably be end of the previous day (16th) if you are on the US West coast.

So things will happen in a little over a week's time. The board will be taken offline between 07:00 and 09:00 BST and will be back up hopefully later the same day, but worst case at some point the following day. I'll try to keep you informed on the holding page that will be in place.

So that's 17th June: ~02:00 EDT (eg New York), ~01:00 CDT (eg Chicago), ~14:00 AWST (eg Perth)
So that's 16th June: ~23:00 PDT (eg Los Angeles)

Forum upgrade is still planned for tomorrow. Will try to update a few times through the day, but please bear with us. The actual database upgrade to the newer schema takes a few hours to run at a minimum.

Finished. Please report any issues either directly to me or via the QSF forum.

Some things may yet change as we bed in new options and so forth, so please bear with us.