::wipes brow:: Whew, glad other people wanted it. It's come in really handy for deleting hundreds of memories on livejournal, and it seems like it would be handy here.

Heads up: duplicate post numbering in Natter, combined with really slow board performance when the rest of the internet is behaving normally.

It happens when everyone's jumping on posting in the same thread at really close times--like a thread ending or starting, or Hec's games.

Fuck, there are so many things half done. Tag closing in posts needs fixing, I have rewritten the code to use CSS positioning only, but the posting box is wack in IE, and then there was the project to switch the back end out to Postgres.

And that's not even counting the bugs reported above.

Thanks, ita. I'd hoped that's all it was, but I wanted to be sure it wasn't anything weird or dangerous.

Got this posting just now: There has been an error. It's of the type we call fatal. Please don't be scared. You're not the one that's going to die.

Okay, where the $$&#&(@#& are the developers? February 15, 2007, 1:11 pm Aimée[68]: FATAL [256] SELECT COUNT(*) AS sub_count FROM subscriptions WHERE user_id=68 AND thread_id= failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '' at line 1 Fatal error in line 103 of file /home/httpd/vhosts/buffistas.org/httpdocs/classes/giles.php, PHP 4.3.10 (Linux)

Fatal error in context array ( 0 => array ( 'query' => 'SELECT COUNT(*) AS sub_count FROM subscriptions WHERE user_id=68 AND thread_id=', 'db' => NULL, 'result' => false, ), )Aborting...

I use Firefox.

(Erm...am I supposed to be alerting you guys to this or not? I'm not sure.)

I just wanted to mention here that the board has been responding very slowly for me when I post or edit. Reading it has been fine, just posting. It's been happening at work and at home, so it's not just the computer or connection.

I'm using Firefox for Windows XP at home and work. At home I'm on dial-up and at work it's a T1 line.

I'd be happy to help figure out how to make the board more efficient.

Well, ain't that grand.

Below I reproduce an email from iStrata support. Read upwards for the history. Sorry about the line breaks:

Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:08:01 -0800
From: support( at )istrata.com
Subject: [ #BCM-87880-427]: Fwd: Plesk key update deferral notification
To: ita( at )thevelvetedge.com

On Fri, 2 Mar 2007, ita( at )thevelvetedge.com wrote:

> Wait--so if we don't pay you to upgrade, is this something we can do
> ourselves? And if we don't upgrade, we're going to have
> compatibility problems?

It's a bit complicated. You don't have to upgrade (we can request that your license be locked to the version you're using (7.5.4). But, like I said in the message below support for Red Hat 7.3 has been discontinued by SWSoft (makers of Plesk). So, unless you do upgrade you're stuck with what you have which is Red Hat 7.5 (which hasn't had any OS updates for several years) and Plesk 7.5.4.

There's no way to do the OS level upgrade yourself. You can save yourself some money by moving your data from one server to the other yourself. But, we're still going to have to bring up a new server for you, and moving from one server to another can get complicated. By having us do the upgrade you eliminate most of the problems (and associated down time) you might encounter if you were to try to do it for yourself.

Kevin

>
> At 06:53 PM 3/2/2007 -0800, you wrote:
>
>
>> For your benefit we keep all our licenses under "software update
>> support" contract. Because of that our licenses are always set to
>> the most current version (so you can update as required). We can
>> request that the license key used on your server be backed down to
>> 7.5 but it does complicate things in the long run because it creates
>> a special condition that has to be tracked. However, if you do
>> decide to upgrade Plesk you'll have to update to Cent OS 3.8 because
>> Plesk doesn't support installing newer versions on top of your
>> version (7.3) of Red Hat. So, unless you upgrade your OS your
>> current configuration is where you'll be stuck (Red Hat 7.3 and
>> Plesk 7.5.4). This is probably as good a time as any to upgrade
>> rather than waiting for the versions to get even further apart.
>>
>> The OS upgrade requires that we move you from your current server to
>> a new server. We can perform the upgrade for you at a rate of
>> $120/hr. The amount of time needed will depend largely on the
>> amount of data there is on your server.
>>
>> Let us know how you want to proceed.
>
> putting the "freak" into "control freak" since 1993
>

--
Regards,
Kevin

yeah, I don't really undertand all that, but it sounds like they have us over a barrel for some "complicated" work at $120/hour. Which, I must say, is a racket I'd like a part of.

That's the basis of it. It has to be done, we can't do it, they charge $120/hr, and if my suspicions are correct, they won't have an estimate for how long it will take (the tech side of me is okay with that, but not the wallet side).