Forum Update: Problems Fixed, We Think

Just three weeks ago, we launched a completely revamped Power Line News site and accompanying Power Line Forum. The good news was that these immediately became very popular; the bad news was that this strained the capacity of the server they shared with Power Line. So, over the holiday weekend, our hosting service transferred the News and Forum sites to two new servers. This required a change in the sites’ URLs. We had hoped the transition would go smoothly, but glitches developed for a number of reasons. The first site was not immediately frozen, so that there was a time when both were operating. The original site was re-set so that it would not accept new registrations, but, unbeknownst to us, that setting somehow failed to stick and so for several days, some people continued to register at the “old” site and were nonplussed when they could not post at the “new” site. There were a couple of other glitches as well.
Lest there be any confusion, the sites are identical. It’s the same site, just on a different server. The posts and registrations that were in place at the time of the switch were simply moved to (or duplicated on) the new server. Anyway, I think all of the technical issues have been identified and, with one exception, resolved. The old site has been closed down and a notice directs visitors to the new URL. The registration issue has been fixed so that no one can register at the old URL, and the registrations that came in over the last few days have been switched over to the new URL. The Forum Dashboard was not working for a while–the links were still sending people to the defunct site–but Joe Malchow fixed that this afternoon.
I think the only remaining technical problem is that the post rating system has for some reason stopped functioning entirely. That will be fixed tomorrow when the folks from the Blog Studio return to their offices.
For most users, we think the switch to the new server was uneventful and may not even have been noticed. To those who encountered problems, our apologies. Go here for Power Line News, and here for Power Line Forum.
More good news: based on our experience so far, we are going to tweak the Forum site a bit to eliminate the automatically-generated topic threads and perhaps reorganize the topic headings a bit to make the site more user-friendly. Those changes should be implemented within the next 48 hours.

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