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11/26/2007: "Upgrade Success!"

Well, we survived the upgrade process, and the forums are now back up and running. From what I hear from the early users, it's pretty painless for them as well - and that was the goal. The URLs have been changed throughout the site, so if you hit the Marlin Club, Trip Reporter, or War Room link on the navbar to the left, you'll get the right forum. Hitting "Forums Home" will take you to the top level of the forums, what we used to call the "Offshore Fishing Forum". That was part of what bit the dust during the upgrade, along with the whole color scheme for the OFF. Everything is now integrated into the lovely teal of SCMO.

Some of the highlights of the upgrade:

- The program running the forums is now using a database instead of the old text files. That means that response in general is a lot faster - particularly if you're doing a search. Searches that used to take 30-40 seconds now take 2-3. A lot of good comes from the database, including the responsibity for backup transferring from me to the webserver. Happy about that, so long as they do their job ...

- We eliminated the "MC Classics" forum, primarily because the search engine makes finding old threads so much easier now. Also, having the duplicate threads in the MC Classics forum led to duplicate search results, which always bothered me.

- Two old features have returned. Back in the day, you could rate the topics to show those that you felt were valuable. We've restored this feature, so users will now be able to determine for themselves which threads are truly "classic". Also, users can once again subscribe to individual threads, so that when someone posts a reply they'll get an email notification. Restoring both of these features is a direct result of moving to the database-driven system, since the data will no longer clog up my webserver.

- Speaking of returns, we also rolled out the new "Marlin Club Archive". Back in the early days of the MC (pre-2001), we were using an old forum program that wasn't compatible with its successor. At that time, we weren't smart enough to preserve the old program - and it's valuable threads - and they were lost to history. Fortunately, through several different sources we were able to stitch together the files from several moments in time of the old MC, and have added them to the mix. The Marlin Club Archive will let you go back in time and read the questions and answers that were present on the board during 4 different periods between November of 1996 and June of 2000. Pretty interesting read ... we've all come a long, long way. You can reach the MC Archive from any page in the Marlin Club, or you can just cheat and go straight there.

- While most of the changes were to the forums, we also made some tweaks to the front page of the site. SCMO has always been like one of those houses with a really great front entrance, except that everyone uses the side door - in our case, the Marlin Club - to enter. So sometimes, I don't give the front door the attention it deserves. We freshened up the look, pulled out a couple of things that weren't really useful anymore (like the scrolling status that never changed and the screaming reel that tripped up most folks' security programs), and reorganized. Most importantly, we gave people a reason to use the front door again - a listing of the most recent topics from both the Marlin Club and Trip Reporter forums. Maybe folks will come in the right way once again - and remember to wipe your feet!

I still have a couple more behind-the-scenes tweaks to make to the site over the winter, but this is probably the only one that will impact the users so much. That is, unless I get a feather up my ass to make more changes ... and you never know ...