CASTE FOOTBALL UPDATE
- Thread starter Don Wassall
- Start date
I appreciate the kind words.
I would merely like to add my comments about how valuable this site is. I am one of those individuals who lurked, learned and had his eyes opened directly from the information on this site. And I believe there are many, many like me who have benefited both directly by posting and indirectly by lurking.
Carolina Speed
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2011
- Messages
- 5,352
I couldn't get on the site all weekend. Everything seems to be fine now. Thanks Don.
If we need to do another $$ drive, please let us know Don. I'm willing to help. I know there's a way to donate anytime, but if everyone here would chip at one time maybe we could collect enough money for you to do a major update if necessary.
If we need to do another $$ drive, please let us know Don. I'm willing to help. I know there's a way to donate anytime, but if everyone here would chip at one time maybe we could collect enough money for you to do a major update if necessary.
Thanks, CS, I'm hoping that will happen. I'll let everyone know when I have a better idea of what all is going to be done and the approximate cost.
Jimmy Chitwood
Hall of Famer
what he said. all of it.
There's still a lot to do. I can't go into detail right now, will keep everyone updated as needed.
Things are still moving forward. You may see a message that the site is down for maintenance when you come here over the next few days, but that's a good thing because it means the site is in the process of being upgraded as well as migrating to a different server.
My webmaster wrote the following explanation of what happened to cause the site to go down:
"We attempted to upgrade the XenForo forum software yesterday from version 1.1.5, which was released February 23, 2016, to the latest XenForo 2.2.10. XenForo ceased support for version 1.5 on May 31, 2019, thus the update was necessary and long overdue. This is a major update and a backup of the database was created just in case anything went wrong. The upgrade was attempted on a separate URL with a separate install of the website so it would not interfere with the live website. However, due to a bug in the upgrade package, the upgrade process launched on the live version of the website with a different install method, even though all of the settings were entered correctly for the upgrade to be performed on the test website.
"Usually, this would not be a big deal because a database backup had been generated. But, after two attempts to restore the database backup it became evident that the backup was corrupted. We have searched extensively for any other way to restore the website to its current state as of September 4, 2022 but there is nothing available to make this happen. It was a double-whammy of two very rare, unexpected worst-case scenarios happening simultaneously.
"The good news is that we do have a working backup from August 16, 2022 and found a workaround for the bug so that the update can be installed successfully. The bad news is that approximately 17 days of posts are gone. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience. If there was any way we could restore all those posts, we would. In the meantime, please let us know your feedback on the new version of the Forum software."
I feel awful about all the lost posts, especially the college football write-ups that were done after 8/16. All I can say is a lot of time has been spent to get the site running better of late, and additionally it has been moved to a new host and server and there should be no more frequent occurrences of downtime and/or slowness.
The software is now updated. If you encounter any glitches or have any other comments, post them here. Once any glitches are fixed I'm optimistic that Caste Football will now run quickly and smoothly for a long time. Thanks for your patience through all of this!
"We attempted to upgrade the XenForo forum software yesterday from version 1.1.5, which was released February 23, 2016, to the latest XenForo 2.2.10. XenForo ceased support for version 1.5 on May 31, 2019, thus the update was necessary and long overdue. This is a major update and a backup of the database was created just in case anything went wrong. The upgrade was attempted on a separate URL with a separate install of the website so it would not interfere with the live website. However, due to a bug in the upgrade package, the upgrade process launched on the live version of the website with a different install method, even though all of the settings were entered correctly for the upgrade to be performed on the test website.
"Usually, this would not be a big deal because a database backup had been generated. But, after two attempts to restore the database backup it became evident that the backup was corrupted. We have searched extensively for any other way to restore the website to its current state as of September 4, 2022 but there is nothing available to make this happen. It was a double-whammy of two very rare, unexpected worst-case scenarios happening simultaneously.
"The good news is that we do have a working backup from August 16, 2022 and found a workaround for the bug so that the update can be installed successfully. The bad news is that approximately 17 days of posts are gone. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience. If there was any way we could restore all those posts, we would. In the meantime, please let us know your feedback on the new version of the Forum software."
I feel awful about all the lost posts, especially the college football write-ups that were done after 8/16. All I can say is a lot of time has been spent to get the site running better of late, and additionally it has been moved to a new host and server and there should be no more frequent occurrences of downtime and/or slowness.
The software is now updated. If you encounter any glitches or have any other comments, post them here. Once any glitches are fixed I'm optimistic that Caste Football will now run quickly and smoothly for a long time. Thanks for your patience through all of this!
white lightning
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2004
- Messages
- 20,799
The commie rulers never stop sending their hackers to any websites that post the truth. Thanks to Don and to the tech crew guys. Much appreciated.
Carolina Speed
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2011
- Messages
- 5,352
It's Ok Don. Glad we're back up. It's better that is happened now, early in the football season. Now we can move forward with a big game tonight featuring Clemson's Will Shipley in a nationally televised game. I hope Shipley explodes!
Leonardfan
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2006
- Messages
- 23,018
I’ll see if anything is on the way back machine so we can repost all the work lost on the writeups.
Justin Eric
Guru
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2020
- Messages
- 108
The new site looks great @Don Wassall!!! Great job
Phall
Master
The new layout looks sharp!
Thanks guys, it's still being fine tuned and so far no glitches reported which is great!
Man that would be great. Y'all put so much work into that! See 48 of the 130 teams now?
Would be nice to get the 2022 College Linebackers up again along with WEEK ONE Stats Re-Cap too.
Glad you got it fixed up Don. Sorry it's been so much trouble
Leonardfan
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2006
- Messages
- 23,018
I checked the wayback machine and unfortunately the last time the site was captured was 8/15. I'll try to go through the official depth charts over the next few weeks and redo the college football writeups.
This is from my webmaster. I'll also post it in the College Football write-ups thread.
It may be possible to salvage some of the lost posts from 8/16/2022 thru 9/4/2022 by using cached results in search engines. If you find a write-up that is worth reposting, you can copy and paste it into a text file or into new post on the site. Keep in mind it is not possible to navigate links within the cached pages, only the page visited can be viewed. Also, the date of the post listed on the cached forum will be relative to the date the page was cached as displayed near the top of the cached result. For example, for a page cached on 8/18, "Today" means the post was created 8/18 and "Yesterday" means 8/17. Search engine crawling of the site has been disabled temporarily so that cached results will not be overwritten.
Bing (set to past month, click the green ▾ next to URL and select Cached):
https://www.bing.com/search?q=site:castefootball.us&filters=ex1:"ez3"
Yahoo (set to past month, click the gray ⌄ next to URL and select Cached):
https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AwrO6bcLZhdjRIkFLOJXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZANMT0NVSTA1NV8xBHNlYwNmaWx0ZXI-?p=site:castefootball.us&ei=UTF-8&fp=1&fr2=time&age=1m&btf=m&fr=yfp-t
Yandex (set to past month, click the gray ⋯ next to URL and select Saved copy):
https://yandex.com/search/?text=site:castefootball.us&lr=200&within=2
Just confirm that the time frame is set to past month after clicking any of the links above. Happy hunting!
It may be possible to salvage some of the lost posts from 8/16/2022 thru 9/4/2022 by using cached results in search engines. If you find a write-up that is worth reposting, you can copy and paste it into a text file or into new post on the site. Keep in mind it is not possible to navigate links within the cached pages, only the page visited can be viewed. Also, the date of the post listed on the cached forum will be relative to the date the page was cached as displayed near the top of the cached result. For example, for a page cached on 8/18, "Today" means the post was created 8/18 and "Yesterday" means 8/17. Search engine crawling of the site has been disabled temporarily so that cached results will not be overwritten.
Bing (set to past month, click the green ▾ next to URL and select Cached):
https://www.bing.com/search?q=site:castefootball.us&filters=ex1:"ez3"
Yahoo (set to past month, click the gray ⌄ next to URL and select Cached):
https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=AwrO6bcLZhdjRIkFLOJXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZANMT0NVSTA1NV8xBHNlYwNmaWx0ZXI-?p=site:castefootball.us&ei=UTF-8&fp=1&fr2=time&age=1m&btf=m&fr=yfp-t
Yandex (set to past month, click the gray ⋯ next to URL and select Saved copy):
https://yandex.com/search/?text=site:castefootball.us&lr=200&within=2
Just confirm that the time frame is set to past month after clicking any of the links above. Happy hunting!
Leonardfan
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2006
- Messages
- 23,018
Looks like that may work for recovering some of the write ups.
woody39
Mentor
Hi Don. Has anyone else reported problems with IP addresses being banned I haven't been able to get on at what seems busy times like yesterday and last Sunday. Thanks for all your hard work
I just checked the last four IP addresses you've used and none of them are banned so don't know what's going on. . .
woody39
Mentor
Yes it's very strange I'm on okay at the moment. Let's hope just its a couple of one off glitches!
The vast majority of the IP addresses I ban are from just a handful of countries -- Vietnam, China, India, Russia and Ukraine pop up over and over again. The only time I'll ban one that (supposedly) originates from the UK or US is if it keeps showing up, but that's a very rare occurrence.