After an intense 24 hours the New and Improved Force Field Forums are now online! The new forums incorporate the latest stable version of Simple Machine Forum and new features to enhance the forum community experience.
This migration was not without its challenges, however. Originally the outage was scheduled for four hours but numerous technical snafus and data migration issues forced them offline for almost a full 24 hours.
The Force Field forums were scheduled to go offline last night, December 15, 2009 from 8 PM to 1 AM EST for upgrades. Due to activity the outage was delayed for an hour to ensure all the data from the new activity would be backed up before the migration. The planned migration to a new forum called Kunena failed on a test site and prompted an eleventh hour (literally 11 PM) decision to use another forum already chosen in case Kunena did not work out.
During this time members were not able to access, read and post in the forums but were able to access other areas of the web site as the initial migration was performed on another test site.
The second forum required a database conversion that also failed on the test site. After several attempts a manual conversion process was performed this afternoon and after testing the database and forums were moved to the production site.
Although great care was taken to preserve the data, some posts and settings may not have transferred successfully. In addition, some logins may not function properly and it may be necessary to change login passwords.
If you do encounter an issue logging in, please click "Forgot Password" on the forum login screen and a new password will be sent to your e-mail address on file.
The new forums will resolve old bugs and introduce new features to enhance The Force Field forum community experience. As these new forums are a separate component of the site and no longer integrated into the rest of The Force Field, The login function on the front page of theforcefield.net will no longer automatically log you into the forums. The forums require separate registration and login from the rest of the site. If you have any questions or trouble logging into the new forums please contact an administrator or e-mail forums@theforcefield.net.
You can access the forums from the Forums link in the menu on the left sidebar or at http://www.theforcefield.net/forums .
Enjoy the forums!