Hopefully I was able to do the upgrade of the website without impacting to many people’ access to it. It and the forums were down for a little while this morning. I have had people bring to my attention a few features that were acting up or not working over the last month or two and noticed a couple more myself. In response I have done a major software version upgrade to the base wordpress website as well as the forum software. As always I don’t anticipate this going perfectly smooth. Experience says that there are always small issues. Please let me know of you notice anything.  I am anticipating that some of the forum plugins will possibly need to be upgraded also. If so I will do that over the next day or so as we figure out which ones no longer work. Sadly those are not free. I need to check that if I have already purchased them once can I re download the the newer versions of them for free. I don’t think that will be the case as it was more of an annual service contract the last time I did this. No worries though as the donations that have given over the last year or so will go a long way to covering the cost. For those of you that have donated please feel warm and fuzzy as I wouldn’t have been able to purchase the new updates without your support.

It is kind of irksome that we are having to pay for these plugins. When we started using this forum software many years ago it was all open source and free. About 4 years ago? the developers went to a new version that the core forums are still free but that plugins that handled stuff such as the image uploading plugin, wysiwyg editor, and other features that we were using became paid for plugins. It would be a major project fraught with potential issues to try and start using a new forum software and keep all the existing posts and content. Many thousands of posts and pictures by hundreds by members. Just for that reason we paid for the plugins the last time we upgraded. Though I feel a bit hostage to the developers at this point seeing as it was all open source and free to start with, I do acknowledge that the writing of the forum software is a huge task and they have made significant improvements, bug fixes and performance enhancements over the years. I have the feeling that they might have moved on years ago and mostly quit developing on it if they were not getting some sort of money out of it now. We all grow up and start to have bills that seem to drive our lives toward income producing jobs. [Image Can Not Be Found]

As always I depend on you guys to let me know when something isn’t working right. Don’t just ignore it. Sometimes I can’t fix it as soon as you notify me as it needs an upgrade like this to resolve but I do listen and note those things down and address it sooner or later. Sometimes I get it fixed in a few hours. Sometimes it is something in the software that requires a developer update to address and we have to wait.

So in my rambling way this is what has happened if you notice differences and or the site was down for you this morning or had major glitches when you tried to access it. As of now I am not currently working on it and it should be working.