The site will be down for maintenance tonight that will result in downtime for a period of 90 to 120 minutes. We are upgrading the server from Apache 1 to 2 that will result in performance improvements.

We will be upgrading all shared servers from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5 beginning Monday, February 9, 2009 and lasting until Friday, February 13, 2009. This upgrade will cause downtime for your databases, therefore; any database-driven sites will show an error during this time. The upgrade should take 15-45 minutes once the process is begun.

This upgrade is needed to bring MySQL to the current stable release, increase performance, and allow you to use a lot of new applications which require MySQL 5.

Sorry folks..but the forum and sites..all of ours, may go down several times through out the week. I would post messages on your sites and let people know that we could go down for maintenance...just in case!

If some of you tried to access the forum from last night until about noon today, you probably noticed an error message. Seems the server upgraded successfully last night but the Gente database needed to be repaired. We spent a couple of hours online with the support group at Site 5 this morning and they were able to repair our database and nothing was lost, *does happy dance*

It may still be touch and go for the next little while until they iron out all the glitches, but hang in there-it should speed up soon..and then they will be updating another feature. As annoying as this all seems. it is necessary to keep the forum running using the lasted versions of programs so I hope you'll all be patient and understanding about this.

And, as always, thank you so much for being here with us through it all!

Nuccia and Carole

I noticed the site down time and wasn't very happy about it!!

Neither were we..especially since the error messages should have been corrected hours earlier. Anyway, things still not may be a hundred percent as we have discovered. We will be updating our scripts on the forum so we have contacted reinforcements .. We will keep everyone posted if the site has to be put offline for it for another few hours. Keep your fingers crossed because if we can get this fixed, then there will be a lot of new features available .. We'll just need to wait and see.

I gave up. Glad its back. Now if I could get off Facebook!!

Don't get too happy. Seems this upgrade has caused more problems than we all originally thought. The forum is going to be upgraded and rebuilt over the next few days by the same person who built it last year. Not sure what is going to happen..there could very well be some downtime but hopefully it will occur when the site is least busiest. The forum may also look slightly different depending on what can be saved with the new upgrade. We will just have to wait and see.

Does this mean posts may be lost? When will this happen?

I'm going to have to leave answers to any questions to Nuccia I'm afraid. You all know that I'm not a 'techie' (that's why I'm known as Dork Vader...).

But I do know she has been in regular contact with the guy who is dealing with the problem for us, and we are both convinced that he will do all that he can to retain everything that we have on "Gente". We both have a great deal of faith in his abilities.

Well we hope we don't lose anything. I doubt we will but anything is possible I guess. We will know more once the upgrade is complete. Until then, we don't know anything. Sorry..not the answer I want to give, but it's all I have at the moment.

Actually, everything seems to be working just fine. I guess I'm not able to find the problem. Is there a poltergeist involved? I found one the other night messing around with my jigsaw puzzle. It kept hiding pieces...

Joe, you crack me up! It's just error messages that we get at the bottom of the screens or when people upload pictures and stuff. We are also TRYING to get more smilies (not sure we can though but we're still trying). The guy helping us is wonderful. If you get a chance, you should check out his sites and designs..

www.treasurecoastdesigns.com/

As you can see..this forum was one of his designs, and he is very fair and ethical. We can't say enough nice things about him (so far) and we have been dealing with him for over a year and a half. He provides amazing service. Lets see him pull his magic here once again (he rescued us last year when we blew up the first, or was it the second forum?) .

Time for bed..tomorrow is Friday the 13th...hmmm...poltergeist huh? Maybe.........

Update here: The site will take anywhere from a few days to a week to upgrade so if you should log in and see the Maintenance Mode Message, don't be alarmed. Keep your fingers crossed everyone. By the end of this all, we're hoping all errors will be corrected and the features running more as they should be.

Well it looks like the major part of the site upgrade is complete. We thought it might take a few days but luckily the designer didn't have too much trouble last night. You will notice a few changes to some of the boards (minor) bet otherwise, everything is pretty much the same. He is going to have to tweak a few other areas though so please, if you find something doesn't work correctly, let us know so we can pass the message along to him.

Test everything..the search button, and try posting embedding a video as well. These are all things we're hoping he can fix,

Hope you all like it.

Is it me..or is the forum lacking color? On the main page of the forum, with all of the categories, it is stark white, with no dividing lines between the forum names. I think that used to be a shade of green. The part where you read posts posted by everyone used to be a darker green.., but now, it is also a stark white now. Is it just me..or is everyone seeing this?