OldIHC

Updates on the Maintenance of OldIHC by John Hansen, Your Site Administrator

2/20/12

It’s finally here – SimplePress Version 5.  This is the completely rewritten version of the forum software that we have been waiting for.  Hopefully this will take care of the issues we have been seeing, PLUS add some nice new features.  Upgrading will not be simple, PLUS the forum may look a little funny for a little while as I create a new skin/template to match the rest of the site, but that’s not as important.

When I find a little time for the forum upgrade, I will do my best to give you as much of a heads-up as possible.  Check here and in the “Site Development” section of the forum itself.

 

2/16/12

I will be shutting the site down later today to re-install the forum software in order to address security concerns. With luck the maximum downtime should be around 2 hours.

Update: The software re-install is complete as of 12:30 pm Central time.

 

1/4/12

Jim Hadfield has been helping me out by trying another re-install of Photopost (the photo gallery software that has/has all of “Our Truck Pics”), however, things went awry – somehow there was either a virus/worm with the Photopost files or a WordPress update.  As you’ve seen, it crashed the entire site.  We are back now, but I am not convinced we’ve eradicated the problem as of yet, so we’ll see how things go.  This is NOT Jim’s fault, and as always, I thank him for his hard work.

 

12/16/11

If you haven’t already read the December TOTM, be sure to check it out.  In the meantime, WordPress has released version 3.3 and I will be upgrading the site over the weekend, most likely late Saturday night.  The WordPress update is mostly back-end administrative improvements, so you won’t see any changes, one way or the other in site operations. During the upgrade, the site (i.e. forum) may be down for a period of up to one hour.

I just installed a handy little plug-in called “Print Friendly and PDF” which you should see at the bottom of each page (You’ll just see separate icons for “Print and “PDF”). This should allow anyone to easily print or convert pages to PDF in a very clean and concise manner.

At this point I would also like to call for volunteers for forum moderators (considering accepting two volunteer positions).  The forum itself has been fine since I keep track, but every once in a while spam creeps in, etc., and I wouldn’t mind an extra set of eyes to help keep things in check.  Any volunteers should keep in mind that they themselves will have to set the example for everyone else  If interested, email me.

 

11/26/11

FINALLY managed to post the November 2011 TOTM – I hope you will forgive me for posting so late in the month – haven’t been feeling very well.  I will obviously be forced to post December’s slightly late as well, but I will work back into a normal schedule.  It’s a wonderful truck – enjoy!  I also want to thank Jim Guthrie for his help in putting this article together.

 

10/20/11

After a bit of a scare in the hospital (was hospitalized from 9/16 until 10/11, then still flat on my back at home until just recently), I am FINALLY back. For a few hours a day, anyway… It is going to take several weeks before I have any of my former strength and stamina back. Thank you Jim, for stepping in while I was out – VERY much appreciated.

 

9/17/2011

Hi guys!  Just wanted to let you know that John and I are still working on a few things.  Please hang in there, it takes time to make it all perfect for you. John was in the ER yesterday (don’t know how that turned out yet) and I have been good and bad days, but we are still here working to help you out.

Jim

 

9/13/11

(8:30 AM Central Time) Just brought the site back online after seeing that it was shut down again due to bandwidth exceedance.  This is a serious problem. The bandwidth limit for the site is 15 GB on a monthly basis.  We never exceeded that before.  For some reason, we exceeded that on the 6th of the month. I had it raised to 20 GB and did a PILE of work after studying the logs to eliminate what appeared to be the big bandwidth hogs.

Obviously something else is happening, and I am beginning to suspect an attack on the site that may or may not appear in the logs anywhere.  The bandwidth is temporarily raised to 30 GB (which will be costing me dearly) and I will be getting tech support involved later today (which will also cost me, but should save in the long run) to see if we can trace the problem down.

For some good news, I posted a new article in the “Resources” section on how to rebuild a Carter YF carburetor, one of the more popular carburetors found on our trucks.  Later today I’ll be adding a supplemental article on adjusting the same carburetor.

 

9/11/11

(11 AM Central Time) Some of you may have tried coming to the site this morning and received a message on your browser instead saying “Bandwidth Exceeded” or some such rot. Well I just got off the phone with the hosting company and got our bandwidth raised for the time being; because we DID exceed our bandwidth for the month somehow.

Something is wrong and I’ve requested a report from them breaking down where the bandwidth is coming from so that I can address it.

My apologies for the inconvenience for those trying to access the site while it was down (was up late last night working and didn’t see this right away this morning).

By way of an update (12:25 PM Central Time) – I am looking at the analysis reports and finding that is simply a combination of our popularity and some major image problems causing the bandwidth exceedances. For example the little “Random Truck” box pulls images from galleries, but some of those images are actually HUGE, and it displays those images all day long, every day, on ALL pages.  So for now, I have disabled this feature.

Another prime example is our forum avatars.  While these automatically get “shrunk” by the forum software, the image itself is still HUGE because people aren’t uploading a small image like they should to begin with.  I am currently in the process of downloading ALL of the avatars – I will then write a small routine in PhotoShop; resize ALL of the images/avatars to the proper size, then re-upload them so that you all still have your avatars – but they will be tremendously smaller file sizes (they will still look the same in the forum), which will then make a HUGE difference, both in our bandwidth issues and should also make the forum pages load quicker.

Update (2:44 PM Central Time) Just completed optimizing over a thousand forum avatars… Reduced the overall impact on the site and forum from 210 MB down to 1.6 MB.  This should make a big impact – both in bandwidth and in forum speed (the pages and posts should load quicker).

 

9/6/11

After going back and forth with the software developer for our “Truck Pics” software (PhotoPost), it has finally come down to the fact that they are basically throwing their hands up.  Well, not quite – but they admit they don’t know what to do based on the fact that we are running everything on a Windows server and it doesn’t seem to be working.  So now what?

I’ve decided to request that our site be changed over to a Linux server for the above reason, AND several other reasons as well that have come up over time.  WordPress (as I’ve mentioned before, this is the platform our entire site runs on) actually runs a little faster and better on Linux than Windows, and therefore our forum (SimplePress – a plug-in for WordPress) may actually improve as well.

This will undoubtedly cost me for the migration, but the goals are:

1. Getting PhotoPost to work for “Our Truck Pics” – Jim Hadfield will be temporarily coming out of retirement to help me re-install the software (thank you Jim!).
2. WordPress should run faster and with fewer bugs.
3. SimplePress (our forum software) should run faster and with fewer bugs.

I cannot make any promises on (2) and (3), with respect to fewer bugs, but in all likelihood we will at least see increased speed from the migration, so that alone makes it worthwhile.

The ONLY downside to all of this is that the site/forum may be down for a short time during the migration itself. I will keep you posted. Keep checking here.

UPDATE 9/7/11 4:56 PM Central Time – The site migration process has begun and I will be putting the forum into “Maintenance Mode” (i.e. “Closing” it) very shortly.

Update 9/8/11 7:59 AM Central Time – And we’re back. I was hoping to say that a LOT sooner, but at least I said it. The host had a little trouble with the migration RIGHT at closing time and will finish up today. For the most part the primary site is working

 

8/28/11

For the most part, the site seem to be running fairly well .  There are some minor glitches re-appearing, such as read vs. unread posts not working for some folks, and PMs not working 100% satisfactory, but overall, everything is still fast and smooth.  I’m still working on the “Our Truck Pics” software with the developer (sad to say), but will keep slugging away on that.

Some fun news for you though – I’m starting a new feature: “Truck of the Month” beginning in September, and to make things even more fun, I’m going to try and do the first round as chronologically as possible by selecting member’s vehicles that represent each significant era for International Harvester.  At times I will also request submissions and may even set up polls – we’ll just have to see how this goes.  The actual “Truck of the Month” will be featured on the home page of the OldIHC, have a web page devoted to it and also be featured on the OldIHC Facebook page!  I think our first TOTM is something pretty special, so look for it this coming Thursday!

 

7/28/11

Worked the last day and a half on finding and finally fixing an issue with the images not working properly within the forum. Turns out it was a conflict between some new Google Analytics code and the Highslide Java Script that controls how the thumbnails enlarge within our forum.  Finally got that sorted this morning.

With respect to the login problems; as far as I know, the new login plugin is working fine.  The only issue that I have had reported to me is that it doesn’t always “remember” some folks, but as I’ve pointed out (and has been pointed out to me…), I’m like that myself

Next I’ll finally go back to making PhotoPost (Our Truck Pics) my top priority and see what I can do about getting our gallery fixed…

 

7/22/11

We’ve been having some issues with folks logging in to the site lately, so I’m trying a new plugin for the login/registration/lost password. Hopefully this will work work a little better. This one is paid vs. free, so I have my fingers crossed…

 

7/10/11

It appears from a few posts that I’ve seen and a few PM’s that I’ve received that a few more bugs are popping up with the forum software, especially now that I’ve upgraded WordPress to version 3.2, which is a bit frustrating. SO, I will try upgrading SimplePress from our current version, which is 4.4.1, to the latest stable version, which is 4.4.5 to see if this will help resolve some of these issues.

With respect to the beta version of the software, this will give me some practice before trying to tackle that, and again, I want to hold off on the beta software a bit until I’m sure it’s relatively safe to use.

Look for the forum to go down for the upgrade later this evening or early tomorrow morning.  Hopefully this will go as well as the WordPress upgrade, but if you are online at the time, you WILL be booted off

UPDATE – At 11:19 PM I unlocked the forum after completing the upgrade of the forum software.  The upgrade seemed to go well.  Let’s see if this helps with any of the bugs.  Fingers crossed.  Heading to bed.

 

7/6/2011

Either tonight or very early tomorrow I will be closing the site for a short period of time (less than one (1) hour if everything goes well) to perform an upgrade to WordPress, the backbone software that runs the entire site.

WordPress just released version 3.2 of their software, which is a major release and upgrade; and it includes many new features and updates.

Most important to us is the fact that it has a lighter footprint, which means it is more efficient and it should run faster.  This may or may not positively impact our forum software (SimplePress – a WordPress plug-in) very much, but lets hope it helps at least a little.

UPDATE – As of 10:30 PM Central time the update is complete and it went smoothly.  I don’t think anyone was even kicked offline (at least I hope not).  Now we’ll see if it helped!

 

7/2/2011

Just wanted to wish everyone a safe and happy Independence Day weekend (at least for those of you in the U.S) Try to keep the fireworks in your garage (you know the kind I mean) from lighting the house up in flames, and take some time out to enjoy some beer and bratwurst on the grill (like I need to twist your arm).

At least here in Wisconsin, we have a beautiful weekend, and I’m getting some work done on the garage (finally).  Enjoy the holiday weekend everyone!

By the by, they (the SimplePress developers) released the beta forum software yesterday, but I’m going to wait for some initial feedback from some of the others (to see if their web sites explode, etc.) before I even consider installing it here…  Pretty soon I hope!

 

6/29/2011

I’m going to use this tab to keep you posted on site updates and news tidbits so that you don’t have to hunt for it in the forums.  Here’s where we stand on a few things at the moment:

Forum: Of course, this is the primary concern for everyone.  I maintain the forum daily to keep it running as fast as possible and recently upgraded the memory from 64MB to 128MB, which resulted in a notable increase in upload and processing speed for the site.  Nonetheless, the forum software itself is still remarkably slow compared to a lot of other packages out there, and there are still quite a few bugs that are bothersome, such as not remembering which posts are read vs. unread, etc.  The forum software is called SimplePress, and happily, there is a new beta version (version 5.0) coming out very shortly.  I have signed up to receive the beta, and will implement it here if I feel I can do so in a safe manner (i.e. we won’t endanger our database).  Keep an eye out here for updates on this issue.

Our Truck Pics: Unfortunately, the photo software is not working properly right now, so bear with me.  The software was originally designed to run in a Linux environment, and when we moved to our new server, we moved to a Windows environment. The photo software doesn’t like this.  I am working with tech support at the host to see if we can develop some workarounds in the code to overcome the problems, so please bear with me.  Keep checking here for updates.

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Spammer Report/List
(Updated 5/17/11)

This is a list of all the spammers that have been trying to take advantage of the people using the Classifieds here. If you encounter one of these “Bad Guys” please, let me know so that I can post it here.

1. Derrick Thomas and Thomas Barry are one in the same person. His email is tho.derrick@yahoo,com  He has hit a couple of times.  He claims to be from Bristol, TN.
2. Edward Barret, edwardbarret5@gmail.com, 2 Hyde Park Square, London W2 2JY UK +447024087504
3. Derek MacGregor, derekmacgregor69@gmail.com, 36 Carter Lane London EC4V 5AB UK +447024087504 (Both Edward Barret and Derek have the same phone)
4. Lesley Bennet, mr.l.bennet@gmail.com, Flat 1, 20 Craven Hill Gardens, London W2 3EE, +447024087504 (Is the phone number starting to look familiar?)
5. Frank Millet, Email: frankmilley@rediffmail.com, frank.millet@rediffmail.com, frankrnilley@rediffmail.com. This guy also scams getting your money back: “He has contacted me since saying that I could get all my money back if I send a Western Union transfer fee to helga.graepp@yahoo.com”
6. Laura Derrick, lauraderrick60@yahoo.com, Nigeria, also goes by: Zauberfee and Seppel
7. These guys are getting pretty bold.  I am not even selling anything in the classifieds and just got an email from Bill Washington [bill.washington23@yahoo.com] and [labird23@gmail.com] asking if I carry “(DUAL CYLINDER TRUCK)”. I Googled is email address and found a great site with a lot of spammer listings.  Please check this out if you are feeling like you may be getting scammed:  http://www.steam-brite.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-1388.html
8. Jan Eijgelaar, jan.eijgelaar3@gmail.com

There is additional information on these in our forums. Just search for “scam”

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