VE in 2015

In the chronicles of VE I am sure the highlights and significant events in the minds of members differ from person to person. Perhaps some of the 2015 highlights that have been more noticeable would include the recent VE trip to Monk's Cowl, or perhaps the ever-growing gear-talk. Maybe the antics of certain individuals running solo across the Berg stand out, or perhaps you are chuffed to be able to use this forum through Tapatalk.

For me there are highlights which perhaps are not very noticeable or significant to others. Often these are events which take place behind the scenes, in the engine room of VE. One such event is the migration of the site to a new host, which has just been completed. This is a milestone that I have been aiming to achieve for some time. And it does not happen at the click of a few buttons. This site has a steady and consistent, upward growth trend in all respects: members, hits, content, disk space, web traffic and server-load. The change in host was in line with being able to ongoingly support this growth trend. Largely it is not something noticeable in the every day browsing of this site, but it definitely contributes to the bigger picture of keeping VE running.

The migration appears to have gone smoothly, though please bear with us if we discover some smaller adjustments which may need to be made.

As much as I would love to do more for the content and presentation on this site, there is yet another "engine room" milestone which first needs to be reached. Once again, we are due for a major software overhaul. With this milestone, I hope to get VE to be totally mobile and tablet friendly, this being a significant trend on the web in general. This means the site will be slick and flexible regardless of what kind of screen or device you are using to browse it (without needing to zoom in, etc). The intention is to reach this milestone towards the end of 2015.

Another highlight of 2015 is that VE now has 4 moderators (including myself). This is indicative of VE's growth trend, as well as a recognition of the need for better management and presentation of the content on this site. I am very grateful for this voluntary assistance from the other moderators. We are focusing on keeping the forum content clean and cataloged for now. At the beginning of 2016 I hope to be in a place to give a bit more focus on this and possibly to introduce more features and functionality in line with this.

So, browse on, and enjoy VE!

While the above mentioned hosting migration was aimed at improving the performance of this site, it appears that the exact opposite may have been achieved. Users, myself included, have on occasion encountered a "Internal Server Error" page while browsing, which disappears after a refresh. I have taken this up extensively with the hosting company who claim not be able to fix it, even though it seems the problem lies with them. This is extremely disappointing and I do apologise for the inconvenience caused. I am now considering moving back to the previous hosting company.

If you encounter this error, or any other strange behaviour on the site, please copy the text of the error message and send it to me in a PM, together with the link of the page where it happened, as well as your IP address which you can get here: www.whatismyip.com/. If you are not able to copy the text of the error message, please try and make a screen shot and I will arrange to get it from you.

Thanks for your help and patience in this regard.

The site will yet again be transferred to a new host, since the experience with Afrihost has unfortunately been disappointing and the server load issues have not been resolved. The migration will commence tomorrow morning at 10am and the site could be offline for a few hours. Please do not try and post anything to the site around that time since the site will move into an offline status anytime from 9h30 onward.

Temporarily, yes. Haven't had a gap to post this on the forum. With a recent forum software update, came a change in approach in how subscriptions are handled. This, among other things, results in the subscribe checkbox being automatically checked every time you post a reply. Many users don't notice it and then suddenly start get email updates from the threads they have replied to, which is an annoyance. Unfortunately this functionality change has not yet been well integrated with the other software used on this site yet, meaning users can't switch off the automatic checking of the subscription checkbox. The problems and annoyance around this functionality change isn't just limited to VE.

I have disabled the subscriptions, rather wanting to err on the side of not annoying users who don't want the subscriptions and don't see the checkbox (probably the majority I think). I do apologise to those who do use this feature. Again, VE isn't the only site where this has been disabled as a way of coping with the issue.

This is only a temporary issue, hopefully not lasting longer than a few weeks. Please bear with me.

I have found a way of working around the subscription issue mentioned above that seems to be working, so this is up and running again.