The forum is now open. The login issues are fixed, you can now login or sign up without any hassle. This week, the entire Forum will be my mailbag – I will be in there actively answering all questions I can get my hands on. To thank you for being so patient and sticking with it. Let’s get started! (read on for the story, as well as details on the upcoming DobberHockey event in Toronto)

Forum Ordeal

Wow, um…I apologize for all that. I went through four programmers. The first one had to step away for personal reasons, the second one pushed me aside for a corporate client that was in trouble, the third one just stopped communicating when I thought we were close – and since I had to move quickly, I had to make a quick decision to cut him off from the server and find a new one. That last one – I was rushed to find – messed with databases as well as the ‘simple’ change that was to be done, and they created a shutdown that lasted five days.

When I cut paid these extortionists guys off, I went all out and just got a top-of-the-line forum guy (and was very careful about the selection process). The best in the business. He looked things over and told me what all of us already knew, though I stubbornly clung to hope that I could still make it work – that VBulletin 5 was the forum version of New Coke. It was Windows Vista. It was crap. He recommended restoring the original forum (VBulletin 3) and then upgrading to VBulletin 4. So that’s what I had him go ahead with. And, wow, wouldn’t you know it? We have a beautiful, updated forum that has zero issues (knock on wood). No more login or sign-up problems, no more problems – period.

One note: During this change, we had to set aside 2.5 months of your posts (i.e. every post that was posted on VBulletin 5). These posts will be added back in over the course of this week (and your post count will eventually reflect that).

After six years, the forum had never been down for more than 24 hours – and that only happened once. The downtime in early February was over 100 hours!

We’re up and running. Thanks for sticking by the forum (and me), and for your patience.

To celebrate this – DobberHockey is having a little get-together in Toronto at the Sports Centre Cafe at Yonge and St. Clair on Friday, Feb. 21 from 6pm to 10pm. More details here.