Site Update

First - I want to apologize for the unplanned outage last Sunday evening and through Monday morning, but as you can tell – I just re-programmed the “ADMIN” sticky, and IT WORKS..!!!! So – please take a minute to review this post, as it will explain what happened, some new features – and why this new format is “different”….. BUT FIRST – I want to thank all the Moderators, who were trying to help all of you – but had little to no info from me, as I was too busy trying to get the site going…. And then – I want to thank all of YOU for you patience and support. As many of you know – our “Technical” staff is “me”, the the entire Rennlist Support Staff is Jen and me…

First, late this past weekend, I noticed that the previous site had become very slow to respond. In short, I tried to band-aid a fix – but that only lasted a few hours. I was having to shutdown/restart the old system several times every few hours. In fact, it was a hardware error.

Monday AM – I got sick of it, and by 8:00 AM, purchased a new server/hardware (there are now 14 servers it takes to run Rennlist – this one being one of the more important ). I built out the new system, installed the new OS/disks, Memory, NICS, etc. – and we were back a few hours later.. Well, almost. The code from the previous drives did not work on the new system.. Hmmmmm…..

Anyway – I robbed some of the code from my development workstation (along with those HDDs, memory, etc… ), and began hacking until the wee hours of the AM (again)… The forums were on-line/off-line throughout Monday afternoon and through the nite. For that – you will probably have noticed some new features – a few of which I’ll mention now….

- Quick Reply, Spell Check, the ability to upload your own Avatars, choose your own password on Registration, link to the latest post you haven’t read in a thread, etc…. All-in-all, there are about 30+ new things. I’ll try to add some “Help” files on these features in the near future (especially how to add your Avatars!)… In the meantime, though…..

- The “Rennlist Member” designations are being added back, but it is a manual process, as the old code and new Forum code is incompatible – so Jen and I are trying to add these without interrupting the Rennlist Services.

- The SEARCH archives are back, but I do realize there are some small problems that still exist in a few Forums. I’ll tackle those in the near future;

- Avatars…. If I uploaded a “custom avatar” for you previously – it is still available to you! Go to “my profile”, View/Update Profile, and add this as the URL for your new Avatar: http://forums.rennlist.com/forums/member/{youruser#}.jpg like Admin one is:

http://forums.rennlist.com/forums/member/1.jpg

- The "Public Photo Upload" site is off-line for a bit (the photo's can still be accessed - but the "upload" function is off). I wasn't going to post this publicly, but I will now. It appears that there are some porno sites who have been taking advantage of that Rennlist "feature". So - I'm going through 1.5 GB of photos trying to clean out that directory. Now - I'm no prude, but some of the content is a little, ummmm - over the edge. I'm not sure what I'm going to provide in the future for this function, so please be patient. I can only imagine how many porn sites have broken links to their pages just now... However......

And, if you are a Rennlist Member - you actually have access to a free website to upload your photo's, avatars, etc. The content is reviewed on a regular basis - but you have 200MB of free space for your website. There are several hundred Rennlist Members who have their sites here http://members.rennlist.com - and it costs nothing if you are a Member, it's a Rennlist service...

Well – that’s about it for now – but again, my thanks to all of you, who have made Rennlist what it has become to so many. And a special “Thanks” again to all the Forum moderators…… I’m sure that the past few days have been as “exciting” for them as it has been for me …….