Author: suboxdoc

Posted: Sun Jul 28, 2013 10:55 am

There will be more upgrades this week. I’m told that the forum downtime should not exceed ‘1-3 hours’, and I’ll try to give a head’s up when that gets close, near the end of the week.

The primary work consists of upgrading to a newer version of phpBB, the program that runs the forum. We are currently using version 2; the newest version is 3 point something. Version 2 has been the same, for the most part, since 2001. The new version has a number of major changes, to the point where there is no automatic upgrade process. Version 3 will be ‘clean-installed’, and then the database from version two will be transferred over– along with all the data that has accumulated over the years.

I’ve delayed this step for a number of reasons. The process is complicated, for one thing. Jamez has done amazing things with version II, keeping it running well for the past 6 years, and adding customizations that allow for video posts and chat, for example. It is expensive to pay someone to manually re-write, in a few days, all of the countless small improvements that Jamez added over six years! I considered starting with a new theme and letting the forum grow from scratch…. but I realized, as i went through different themes and colors, that the present forum is just how it should be.

I haven’t yet pulled a winning lottery ticket (to be honest, I never buy lottery tickets). But a couple readers have been generous over the past year or two– donating enough to cover the cost of moving to a new server last month, and to cover the costs for the current renewal process. THANK YOU– I really appreciate your help.

I’ve also been fearful about losing data. Your posts and responses create a database of wisdom that holds great value to visitors wanting to learn about buprenorphine. I am doing everything I can think of– back-ups of back-ups– to make sure we don’t lose anything. There is one issue I cannot avoid….. there will be a window of time that might be lost this week, lasting from an hour to a couple days. The old database must be saved and transfered to the new forum. Posts in the window of time between saving the database and turning on the new forum might be lost. I’ll minimize that time the best I can, but if you happen to write ‘the mother of all posts’ this week, consider making a copy so that you can re-post if necessary on the new forum.

What do we hope to gain, you ask? The new version of the forum is more efficient, using less code to do the same things, which usually means better performance (i.e. speed). Te new verson has modules that improve search engine performance. For example, the URL’s for different pages of the forum can include the topic on that page, instead of just showing indecipherable number/letter combinations. Other modules provide one thing or another; I’ve mentioned sharing buttons (like twitter) and generally hear negative feedback, but there may be something down the line that we all decide to be an interesting addition to the forum. There are also a couple small issues that I’m told can be fixed; the header not reaching all the way across the page in some browsers, the flash of code that appears after saving a post….

I ask for patience through downtime, if it were to occur. Please send me an email ([email protected]) if you have any problems that last more than a couple hours.

Finally… those of you who read this long clearly have an interest in this forum. I ask that each of you do what you can to improve our circulation. If you are out of the closet with your addiction and have a large following, consider ‘liking’ the forum, or tweeting about it. If you have your own web page, consider adding a link to the forum. If you have your own blog, add the forum to your blogroll. The forum represents the interest of more and more individuals in a given topic; express that interest by spreading the word about the forum. I have a few very interesting topics on the docket at the ‘talk zone’, that I hope will be discussed here—-such as studies of the emotions and personalities of people on long-term buprenorphine, vs those on other opioids or in ‘step-based recovery’. Results from a number of interesting clnical trials are starting to appear in the literature; the challleng is to interpret those results intelligently and to separate ‘what we know’ from ‘what we think we know.’

Addiction continues to be the ‘big frontier’ of medicine. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and observations here, on SuboxForum.

J