Announcement Regarding Some Important Updates To Our Forum And When Our Site Will Be Under Maintenance

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
I have spent the last week researching what I felt was the next step for WBF and it started with this thread......

https://whatsbestforum.com/threads/a-suggesting-about-search.30783/#post-652427

about which all of us agree, to wit our advanced search engine sucks for our needs as it does not search words that are less than 3 characters. As written in that thread we had purchased a Xenforo plug in for advanced search. Unbeknownst to us at the time, was that under our exiting architecture we could not use the Advanced Search plug in which is supposed to resolve words of 3 characters or less. In order to use this plug in we had to be on our own server as an app is installed over the server called "Elastic Search". That meant we needed to change to our own server

Initially I wondered if this was doable but after huddling with our web host I am happy to announce that WBF will have our own VPS starting on or about 0800 PDST this Saturday June 13

I am posting this announcement to inform all members that in order for the migration to take place our site will be down and the screen will show an Under Maintenance notice for 4-6 hours until after the migration everything can be checked to be operational. Of course in these sorts of computer server things I have learned they not always go flawlessly so please bear with us if the site is down for longer than expected. Certainly many thousands of eyes are better than a few pair of eyes so I would like to suggest that this thread be used to report any bugs

The upside of all is this all positive as we are now able to eliminate the firewall and the hope is the site should be much faster as a result. We have also enlarged our disk space so we are hoping for improved speeds and less of those Server 503 Error messaages

And finally most of all we would like some feedback about this advanced search plug in

It's our commitment and desire to make WBF the daily landing spot for audiophiles from all over the world

To the OP of the above thread, on behalf of Ron and I and Julian we would like to thank you for inspiring us to bring this to you. We care about this place we all call home for a short while each day and if there are suggestions to make the site better please feel free to bring them to our attention. Not saying we can do everything but this Xenforo platform is far more flexible than the much outdated vBulletin we used previously
 

LL21

Well-Known Member
Dec 26, 2010
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Fantastic news, Steve. For all of us who have searched for XLF or i2s or any other such thing, as well as more general searches...and discovered it was faster to go to google and search for WBF and XLF, etc, etc...this is great and appreciate the continued time and efforts you all are making to improve an already phenomenal site.
 

Ron Resnick

Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Jan 24, 2015
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Beverly Hills, CA
Great work, Steve and Julian!
 

Folsom

VIP/Donor
Oct 25, 2015
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Eastern WA
I use Google to search the forum almost exclusively, if this makes it so I can find anything without doing that I’ll be thrilled.

Btw Google doesn’t work great because it barely understands that “whatsbestforum” isn’t a string of words - sometimes it forgets that altogether.
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
I use Google to search the forum almost exclusively, if this makes it so I can find anything without doing that I’ll be thrilled.

Btw Google doesn’t work great because it barely understands that “whatsbestforum” isn’t a string of words - sometimes it forgets that altogether.
Like you I found myself doing the same. I know that this plug in is used elsewhere so I’m hoping this is the silver bullet.

It’s only over when the fat lady sings :)
 
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tima

Industry Expert
Mar 3, 2014
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Will a, for example, three-letter search return only 'whole' words matching the search term?

If the search term is 'SRA' will search return instances of sra as a standalone, or will it also return words that have 'sra' inside them, eg. Srajen. MBL, will it return 'preamble'? etc.
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Will a, for example, three-letter search return only 'whole' words matching the search term?

If the search term is 'SRA' will search return instances of sra as a standalone, or will it also return words that have 'sra' inside them, eg. Srajen. MBL, will it return 'preamble'? etc.
Tim

Be patient. I honestly don’t know. Remember also that a 3 letter word can be letters, numbers and characters
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Will a, for example, three-letter search return only 'whole' words matching the search term?

If the search term is 'SRA' will search return instances of sra as a standalone, or will it also return words that have 'sra' inside them, eg. Srajen. MBL, will it return 'preamble'? etc.


Tim

Here is what I found regarding the plug in

Initially, you will need to enter the details of your Elasticsearch server. Once you have entered the Elasticsearch details, you will be able to configure elements about your index:

Stop words: stop words allow you to control whether any words won't be included in the index. This can reduce the size of the index.
Word stemming: if enabled, this can improve results by considering different forms of the root word to be identical. For example, searching for "tests" would also match "test", "testing" and "tested".
Accent removal and character simplification: if enabled, accents and other characters will be simplified before indexing. This can improve results by allowing you to match a word (such as esta/está), regardless of whether the post or the search included the accent.
 
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Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Again

just a reminder that the forum will be closed tomorrow evening at 1030 PM PDST for 4-6 hours as we undergo a migration from a shared server to a VPS which will allow us to finely have a truly better advanced search function
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
An update regarding our migration

Well we are finally on the VPS after the migration during the night

The firewall has been removed

As for advanced search they are advising to run the existing on the VPS for today and if there are no bugs or other issues they will install the Advanced Search Plug in

If anyone finds any bugs or issues please use this thread t report them here

Also if you cannot access the page you should log out , close your browser, reopen it and log back into WBF
 
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Ron Resnick

Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Jan 24, 2015
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Great work, Steve and Julian! :D
 

Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Always a fine feeling when the system comes back online.
Good job, guys!

Thanks Tim

As to where we are with the Xenforo Advanced Search ......

Elastic Search has been installed and confirmed operational but we are having a problem getting it validated by Xenforo


it's only over when the fat lady sings
 

tima

Industry Expert
Mar 3, 2014
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One item to bring to your attention... I don't know if it is upgrade software related.

Yesterday after WBF came back on-line I created the post here:
https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/just-arrived-allnic-rose-mc-cartridge.30845/#post-654627

That post has two .jpgs in it.

I no longer see those pictures. I've made no changes to my computer system or browser since posting them at 6:35am CST. In their place are numbers 66195 and 66197. I assume those may be some WBF internal reference. When I looked a second time, instead of the numbers I see "Alnic Puritas construction .jpg" and "158591223301.jpg"
Wierd. Also, I cannot run my cursor across those words as one would do for a copy, although I can do that with other words in the post.

I was going to Edit the post and re-insert the pictures, however the Edit function shows the .jpgs are there. So it appears as if the pictures are in WBF but they do not display.

I do see posts with pictures where the post was created prior to the latest update.

What should I do to get my pictures to appear?

Fwiw, I thought WBF had a thread for testing, but I can't find it in the list of forums. I was looking for the word 'test' in forum titles. If it is still there can you give me the name of the thread. Thx.

Test...

Allnic Puritas construction.jpg

1585961223301.jpg

I see both .jpgs here, but not at the above mentioned post.
 
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rando

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Sep 22, 2019
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Fwiw, I thought WBF had a thread for testing, but I can't find it in the list of forums. I was looking for the word 'test' in forum titles. If it is still there can you give me the name of the thread. Thx.

They appear to have done away with it. A few months ago it was in place as described in Steve's announcement.

Media/hyperlinks not leading to their original path behind the scenes is a very common occurrence during forum maintenance. Luckily, for them, it appears to be limited to a very short time period that wasn't mirrored to the new server. Fixing one or two missed connections is very simple, +1K is just a lost cause.
 
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Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
as the plot thickens, we find we are going to have to update our version of Xenforo as well as our version of Advanced search and this is going to take some time as we will be using a mirror version in the update of Xenforo
 

tima

Industry Expert
Mar 3, 2014
5,777
6,819
1,400
the Upper Midwest
Media/hyperlinks not leading to their original path behind the scenes is a very common occurrence during forum maintenance. Luckily, for them, it appears to be limited to a very short time period that wasn't mirrored to the new server.

Thanks rando. I suspect that is exactly what happened.
 

rando

Well-Known Member
Sep 22, 2019
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@Steve Williams

Finally managed to get onto the site tonight on a spare laptop after jumping through some browser security hoops. Every other machine I tried informed me my clock was ahead so I couldn't access the site due some issue related to the site's certificate. Perhaps others are facing this issue and were unable to report it.

Currently I'm seeing an invalid or revoked certificate and red triangle with exclamation mark claiming the site is not secure in my browser bar.
 

LL21

Well-Known Member
Dec 26, 2010
14,411
2,509
1,448
Same.
 

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