Losing my patience with 4.0 Upgrade

[Ecnad]

Requested Upgrade on 06/03

Upgrade Started on 06/16 after a delay caused by requirements not at that time updated on IPS's home page

Since then we have had two failed upgrade attempts, and now have Tier II patching things by the minute as the server goes up and down with crashes, database lockups and more issues from the massive amount of background tasks that have to run.

Each error comes with more delays while I wait for support to get to me and now 8 days later I have a non-functioning community that is down more than up and my members are raising hell and fleeing.

My community suite is the core of my site and I am losing a lot of money by not having people on there to convert to customers. Badly need this worked out and I wish I could get a dedicated person at Invision to step-in and see this through to a complete and working upgrade. Not a patch or restart and then go away for me to have to call back again, but someone who won't quit until the process is complete and functioning 100%

I've been a customer for 10 years and this is the first time I have had this level of frustration and downtime.

[Lindy]

I appreciate you taking the time to express your feedback and I'm very sorry you were caught in the middle here. Unfortunately, virtually all of your issues were caused by self-hosted server issues beginning with PHP 5.2 which has been considered end of life for over 4 years now. The server was not able to handle the rebuild process and it also appears you had table corruption issues, which also were the result of server issues. While we do what we can, we can't control the environment, deal with out of date PHP versions, corrupted tables and inadequate specifications. 

Since the framework for IP.Board (3.x) was virtually the same as when you became a customer 10 years ago, you've never had this issue before, but with the advance of technology that we were able to leverage in IPS4, it is unfortunately going to demand that self-hosted customers conform to standards of today -- this means it's going to be less forgiving to older or less adequate hosting setups. We knew that going in and felt it was an appropriate sacrifice that would ultimately benefit the product and more importantly, clients. 

It seems that between your host and our T2 team that your concerns have been addressed. Hopefully you're past the niggles and can enjoy the suite from here on. Please let us know if you have further concerns and thanks again for your feedback... and your business. 

[3DKiwi]

And of course since you're a commercially run forum you set up a test forum and did a test upgrade? If not then I think you were terribly naive to dive in upgrading.

Harsh words over. I'm glad IPS have been able to resolve things for you.

[TracyIsland]

And of course since you're a commercially run forum you set up a test forum and did a test upgrade? If not then I think you were terribly naive to dive in upgrading.

Harsh words over. I'm glad IPS have been able to resolve things for you.

dislike this post

[Matt]

Why dislike the post? Doing a test upgrade on a copy of your live database is always good idea - especially when dealing with major versions.

[3DKiwi]

I fully expected a few people would take exception to my post so no surprise.

If I was running a commercial forum where I made money rather than a hobbyist forum (even though it's a reasonable size and I make money from it from Google adsense and banner ads) no way would I have upgraded to version 4 yet, and when I did I would have tested things on my server with a copy of my forum. There would then be no surprises at when it came to upgrading my live forum.

[TracyIsland]

Why dislike the post? Doing a test upgrade on a copy of your live database is always good idea - especially when dealing with major versions.

simple - you can offer constructive advice or you can deliver it by means of lecturing, finger wagging and a demeaning manner.

[Ecnad]

Doing much better today. With Invision's advice my host fixed some things in sql and I am back to manually processing the tasks. Still about half a million posts to go... but I can see the light!

Thanks for letting me get some frustration out yesterday - I was mentally and physically exhausted after babysitting the site for several days and nights to keep it up as much as possible.

And yeah, I should have done a test upgrade. Thanks for the reminder. We did do backups, which we reverted to thrice. I guess I got lazy from years of easy upgrades from Invis. Like Lindy pointed out, this was my first major upgrade

[Charles]

Just shows you care about your site that you get so worried when things aren't right

[Lindy]

Thank you very much for taking the time to follow up. I'm glad there's a light at the end of the tunnel for you and hopefully it's smooth sailing from here on.

[RevengeFNF]

Why dislike the post? Doing a test upgrade on a copy of your live database is always good idea - especially when dealing with major versions.

I made dozen of upgrades tests. Even then, when i was upgrading my live site, i thought: "I should have tested one more time" 

[ghinton]

Good thing you had backups! I have had to learn the hard way!

[Mopar1973Man]

I'm in the process of bench testing IPS4 now. Currently just playing with a empty database version now. To learn where controls and setting are. Here soon I'll do a mock upgrade alone side my live site that is still for testing purpose make sure all plugins and other data work properly. I'm still doing plugin checking to see if all my plugins are going to be ready for IPS4. I will not upgrade my live site till the mock site is 100% functional.

Ecnad, I'm glad the support staff could straighten out your mess and get you rolling. They are a great bunch of tech's!

[Ecnad]

We had a few more issues, but a final patch (coming to all boards in the next update) fixed our last problem and the board is now running smoothly. Was a good mix of old server software and a very large community to upgrade with a couple small invision patches, but Invision (and b.farber specifically) got it going for me.

[Dll]

I appreciate you taking the time to express your feedback and I'm very sorry you were caught in the middle here. Unfortunately, virtually all of your issues were caused by self-hosted server issues beginning with PHP 5.2 which has been considered end of life for over 4 years now. The server was not able to handle the rebuild process and it also appears you had table corruption issues, which also were the result of server issues. While we do what we can, we can't control the environment, deal with out of date PHP versions, corrupted tables and inadequate specifications. 

Since the framework for IP.Board (3.x) was virtually the same as when you became a customer 10 years ago, you've never had this issue before, but with the advance of technology that we were able to leverage in IPS4, it is unfortunately going to demand that self-hosted customers conform to standards of today -- this means it's going to be less forgiving to older or less adequate hosting setups. We knew that going in and felt it was an appropriate sacrifice that would ultimately benefit the product and more importantly, clients. 

It seems that between your host and our T2 team that your concerns have been addressed. Hopefully you're past the niggles and can enjoy the suite from here on. Please let us know if you have further concerns and thanks again for your feedback... and your business. 

All seems fair, but reading the original post it sounds like IPS did the upgrade. That being the case, surely whoever did it should have checked the server environment, seen that it was using an ancient version of PHP and said it wasn't advisable to run the upgrade until that was sorted? That one simple check would have saved a lot of downtime, and a lot of work on IPS's part?