Cloudy Nights Revamp

[MrB (Simon)]

Looks like CN is getting a facelift.
It's a strange feeling when you can't access a site, I'm getting withdrawal symptoms already and I don't even go there all that often compared to IIS.

Lets hope CN makes a speedy return!

[rmcconachy]

The software that underpins the Cloudy Nights (CN) forums is indeed being upgraded. Last I heard, Mike Bieler (the site owner) had been told that the down time would be about two days. My understanding is that this part of the upgrade involves transferring across members' accounts, private messages and galleries along with all of the posts (including merging all of the older posts that were previously located in the forum archives back into the `live' forums). However, I believe that the reviews and classifieds sections will not be available immediately when the new site comes up, they will be re-added at some later date (I don't know when).

Declaration: I was previously a mod and admin over at CN but I was not involved in the site upgrade so I don't know all of the ins and outs about it.

[Lee]

Funny, the big spiel that you get at the site doesn't mention anything about forum downtime.... maybe they jumped the gun on the welcome email for the new site!

[leinad (Dan)]

Funny you mention this;
I got an email from them earlier that looked like illegitimate email linking to:
http://cloudynights.hoopladev.com/

Thought they'd be hacked..

[hobbit]

I just got my new account email.
If I'm not mistaken, CN was running UBB which is pretty ancient.

[rmcconachy]

I don't know what the deal is with the email about the hoopladev site but I got one too. I suspect (remember that I'm not speaking in any official capacity, I'm just guessing) that somebody may have made a mistake and posted out the URL for the now defunct test site. I was told that the new CN site would reappear at the same URL as the old one, i.e., http://www.cloudynights.com/, when it comes back (although we will log in using our registered email address rather than our user name).

The down time is unfortunate but it's almost unavoidable when you are moving 70+ thousand user accounts and I don't know how many million posts between different hosts and software (the work required to avoid it is expensive). There were new sticky threads recently added to every CN forum (and longer threads in the "Feedback" and "Announcements" forums) on the old site in an attempt to notify all members of the upcoming changes but many people (including myself ) don't check out the stickies regularly.

In reply to the last post: CN was indeed running on top of an ancient version of UBB.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

That explains some of the grumpy posts we've seen today then

[Exfso (Peter)]

I must admit I also got the hoopla email and marked it as spam, thought it may have been dodgy.

[AG Hybrid (Adrian)]

Upside is. Increased traffic for IIS. With CN closed for reno's, people will look to other forums for info or for Astro chat. Hello IIS. Don P for instance has been pretty active on these forums as late for a sage of CN.

[MrB (Simon)]

Have to say, I'm loving the new look!
It suits a 7" tablet nicely too.

[GordonCopestake (Gordon)]

Down again so IIS gets even more users!

[rmcconachy]

Cloudy Nights has reverted back to the old site and software again. I gather that Hoop.la turned out to be too expensive after page views increased substantially (even after removing traffic from web crawlers re-indexing the site). Mike Bieler (CN's owner) and Greg K. (one of the CN admins) have announced that there will be another upgrade to a different new forum software at some stage in the future but I don't know any details.

[hobbit]

For site the size of CN (apparently the had around 25,000 posts since the new site went live) They really need a proper dedicated server with something like IPB or xenforo on it.