jasonlitka  Apr 4 2006 - 8:13am   

This site will be probably be going down tomorrow morning for a RAM upgrade from 2GB to 4GB.  More info when I get the upgrade scheduled (assuming that it isn't going to be done within 15 minutes of my finding out).

*** UPDATED ***
The upgrade has been scheduled for 8:30 AM (Central) on 4/5/2006.  The downtime shouldn't exceed 1 hour.

*** UPDATED ***
The upgrade is complete.  Man does that make all the difference in the world...  If it stays nice and fast over the next week or so then I'll loosen the search restrictions I mentioned below.

jasonlitka  Apr 1 2006 - 2:16pm   

Yes, we've completely changed the look of the site.

Dave and I have been working hard on this conversion.  We spent a good part of Thursday deciding exactly what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it.  He spent most of yesterday working on the layout and appearance, to make it look and feel like the new forums do, and I spent most of yesterday converting the old static content to the new dynamic layout.  Two days on this might not seem like much, but for two guys who are generally supposed to be doing other work, spending 20 man-hours on a redesign is quite a bit, especially since we were rushing to get it done and running before the weekend.

Links to hot forum topics and new forum topics can be found on the right side of your screen.  Below that, we have the article archive.  For now, there's not much in it.  It will allow you to see when articles have been posted to the site.  With the support of the rest of the staff, we're planning on keeping the front page fresh with new content.  On the left side of the screen we have the navigation menu, advertisements from supporting vendors (if you're looking for parts for your third-gen, check them out before you look anywhere else), and the RSS feed.  For those of you with an RSS viewer (http://www.google.com/search?q=RSS+viewer), this will let you know when new content is posted on the front page, without even having to visit the site!

The "Tech Articles" section has all of the user-submitted how-to's that have been collected over the years.  If you have something that we don't, contact 'JT' on the forums and he'll see that it's posted up here and that you get all the credit (all-text write-ups are good, but man do we ever love pictures).  The "Media" section is also something I'd love to see grow.  If you have audio clips or movies of your car (at the track or in your driveway, doesn't matter), magazine articles featuring third-gens, or old sales media, contact us immediately as we'd love to host them on our site.

Anyway, I hope you all like the new look of ThirdGen.org.

jasonlitka  Mar 31 2006 - 1:28pm   

The search feature on the forums is back up and running.

There are a few caveats though.  First, no more than 5 users can search at a time.  I've been testing on this and more than that number starts to really cause degraded performance.  Second, you can't click your browser's "Stop" button and then try to resubmit a search.  If you do, you'll end up having to wait 5 minutes before you can search again.  This is to prevent multiple searches for the exact same thing by the same person.  Searches can take up to 60 seconds to run (although at times of low load it should be 10 seconds or less), please be patient and wait for them to finish.  Finally, search results are limited to 500.  To be honest though, if you can't find what you're looking for in the top 500 results, you're probably not going to find it.

jasonlitka  Mar 30 2006 - 8:15pm   

As many of you have already heard, ThirdGen.org is now under new management. Since we purchased this site, our main goal has been to update it and change things for the better.

So far, the site has been moved to much faster hardware, hosted at The Planet in TX, and the forums have been upgraded to the newest version of vBulletin (the previous version was from 2002). We will be the first to admit, though, that not all has gone smoothly.

While we are familiar with running forum sites like this one, we have never had to transfer a site this large to a new server, nor have we ever had to upgrade a site from the 2.x version of vBulletin to the 3.x chain. With that transfer and upgrade came some problems.

All of the avatars were corrupted. This, unfortunately, was unavoidable. 2.x versions of vBulletin kept avatars in the database. Dumping the data and then reimporting on the new server caused them all to be damaged beyond repair. The same issue would have occurred if the site went down and had to be restored from a backup. The newer versions of vBulletin, however, allow the storage of attachments, avatars, and profile pictures all in the file system. This causes less table locking in the database, and faster file access when you want to view an attachment.

Likewise, the "search" feature has been no end of headaches for me personally. At first, it was shooting the load on the server to the point where it completely stopped responding. We've been working for the past two weeks (including 18 hours of overtime for me over last weekend) to resolve that issue and I thought we had it. Earlier today though the site began to lag again. Examining the database load showed the search to be the problem. Our apologies, but it has again been taken down, and will probably remain that way for the duration of the weekend.

The last issue that has come up is that of the advertisements that have appeared on this site, most notably, the Google AdSense ads. With the purchase of this site, the lease of new hardware, the time spent in the move, and the time Dave and I are STILL spending in working to make this site a better place, our company has incurred significant expenses. The truth is though, none of the ads are very intrusive. On this page, they appear at the top and left side, below the menu. In the forums, they're at the very top and very bottom of the page.

For the record, yes, we are a for-profit organization. We are NOT, however, here to strip this site of everything it's worth and then move on. We are looking to improve the site, both through the use of newer software and hardware, as well improve search-engine rankings, to bring in more members. Yes, more members would mean more advertising revenue for us, but it also means more people contributing to the community, which will, in the end, be benificial to all of us.

We are looking into a few things though to reduce or possibly even eliminate the Google ads. If anyone knows of additional fixed sponsors who might be interested in advertising on this site, please email us at webmaster@thirdgen.org.