Board Offline

[CyberFreak]

When do you turn your board offline?... Some forums turn the forum offline over the smallest things such as revamps and changing of forum icons, new forum banner, a new service or a permissions problem.

To me i think alot of the time turning the forum offline is unnecessary and will only hurt the activity of your forum.

 

[Mike]

I agree, Its un-needed, If you dont Want people to See the new changes yet, then dont upload them 🙂

 

[f199]

The only things I think it's needed for are

Major Problems with the server
DNS change from moving hosts

And maybe other things.

 

[Nebulous]

As far as a revamp,
Anyone who is making a forum style should do it on a test board and when its all ready to go, just copy and paste or upload (depeding on the software) it to the real forum.

 

[CyberFreak]

Main offenders are IF forum owners and for that they just need to copy and paste which takes not long to do yet the forum is offline for a day or 2.

Only things we use it here for is phpBB updates.

 

[TheExoticFish.com]

When I upgraded from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 I didn't take mine offline. It was off for about a minute when my upgrade was complete and I had to delete the install file, but that was all.

 

[f199]

It's easy when there isn't any mods install but takes time if the forum is heavily modified.

 

[TheExoticFish.com]

I just uploaded the mod files after the upgrade then cleared the cache and refreshed the template.

 

[CyberFreak]

We did the automatic update and that updated all the files but the functions.php files as there was some conflicts so i had to download the new version of that file then redo all the edits for that file then upload it.

 

[Cloverfield]

It's best to keep it online as much as you can.

 

[AquaTeen]

I've only turned my board off once and that was to make a full backup before I moved the forums over to phpBB3.

Just wanted to make sure everything was right as I made the transfer a few minutes later 😀

 

[spyka]

I do any work on the forum in the early hours (unless it is a major problem). As a UK forum there isn't much happening at 4am so it's when all work, updates, backups and such are carried out. That way there isn't an affect on activity

 

[Mr. Bond]

Only time I turn mine off line is if I am upgrading or doing something that will cause someone to see errors.

 

[Murder he Wrote]

For revamps, i normally put all the users on the default Prosilver style, make changes and then put the edited style up.

For things such as forum icons, best bet is to wait till a quit time on your forum and slap them all up. ~smile~