What happened?
Recently, the FOSSBilling forum has suffered from a significant amount of downtime with the uptime being as low as 80% over the month of July.
This forum is hosted by one of our Steering Committee members who has remained unresponsive during this downtime despite multiple attempts to make contact from other team members.
Now what?
While as of the time of writing this the existing forum is online and working, we are working to replace it with this newly built version of it to ensure future stability. (and if you are reading this, the switch has been made!)
Two things will be immediately clear:
The new forum is utilizing the older, more established MyBB forum software rather than the newer and more modern Flarum software which powered the previews forum.
So why the switch?
What else is effected?
In addition to the forum, we have also seen high levels of outages with email and the preview build downloads.
We will be looking to replace both of these items as well to ensure reliability across the board however in the meantime neither of these items will prove to have much effect on FOSSBilling users when they do have outages.
The new forum does not use the existing email server for outbound emails and will continue to function correctly if the FOSSBilling email server goes down.
Recently, the FOSSBilling forum has suffered from a significant amount of downtime with the uptime being as low as 80% over the month of July.
This forum is hosted by one of our Steering Committee members who has remained unresponsive during this downtime despite multiple attempts to make contact from other team members.
Now what?
While as of the time of writing this the existing forum is online and working, we are working to replace it with this newly built version of it to ensure future stability. (and if you are reading this, the switch has been made!)
Two things will be immediately clear:
- All previous posts have been lost.
- The forum is now running entirely different software.
The new forum is utilizing the older, more established MyBB forum software rather than the newer and more modern Flarum software which powered the previews forum.
So why the switch?
- With the user who hosts the existing forum being unresponsive, we do not have access to a database backup of the existing forum.
- One of the driving reasons for us to create the forum originally was to have an easily indexable source of data which would be discoverable with a Google search, something that Flarum has proved to be very ineffective at due to it's lack of focus with SEO and the JS dependent nature of it's infinitely scrolling design.
- The Flarum installation we previously were using broke somewhat frequently with any actions within the forum resulting in errors being generated. We are unsure if these were related to the server that it resided on or if the issues were due to Flarum itself, though.
- While they aren't as fluid and modern interfaces to use, older forum software such as MyBB offers us greater control over the community we build and how information is presented on the forum.
What else is effected?
In addition to the forum, we have also seen high levels of outages with email and the preview build downloads.
We will be looking to replace both of these items as well to ensure reliability across the board however in the meantime neither of these items will prove to have much effect on FOSSBilling users when they do have outages.
The new forum does not use the existing email server for outbound emails and will continue to function correctly if the FOSSBilling email server goes down.