Attention Everyone!
The KVR forum currently runs on phpBB 2.x and it's long overdue an upgrade to the 3.x tree, which brings with it many great features from an admin, moderator and user point of view, such as sub-forums, topic merging, improved search, mobile support, drafts, reporting, per-forum notifications, etc.
A key issue is that while the upgrade is running the forum can't really be used (well, it can but any new registrations and posts would not be migrated). The upgrade process is pretty resource intensive too so it needs to be done off-server (it will take several days).
So, the plan is to disable new registrations and lock all forums. I'll take a dump of the database and perform the upgrade on a backup server and then upload the upgraded database to the live server when the upgrade has completed. This will be done over the Christmas period, traditionally a quieter time.
In summary, to perform the upgrade and retain data integrity we need to:
- Disable user registrations.
- Disable all posting (new topics and replies)
- Disable user registrations and lock all existing forums.
- Export the database
- Create a few temporary forums, probably just:
- General Audio Discussion
- Market Place
- Music
- Off Topic
- Keep these temporary forums open for posting until the upgrade is done.
User registrations will remain disabled until the upgrade process is completed. Guest posting will be allowed though (unless it gets abused, then it too will be disabled).
