Great Western Coffee Shop

Today (13th June) the forum moved to a new server, which has updated security.   You need to request a password reset to your email address, and reset you password, to log back in to your account.

If you have problems, please email me at graham@wellho.net from the email account that's registered, and I can help you.   If you email from a different account, we just have to go ask you to email from the registered account, as tho form of asking is a well known way for others to steal your identity ...

With many thanks to grahame for his efforts in restoring our ability to log into the Coffee Shop forum, I've merely taken the liberty of quoting his post above (but with his trademark typos corrected!) to 'bump' this particular topic slightly.

Hope this helps.  Chris.  ;)

This may not be the most urgent issue, but the Acronyms/abbreviations page says "Sorry - this is an internal page." and asks me to log on but does not accept an ordinary user.

Ah ... cue grahame on that one, stuving - thanks for raising that particular issue.  :-[

The non-forum front pages are *mostly* there, but a change in underlying software means that some need fixing is needed.  Aware of the issue, but it's currently fairly down the list; as you say, not urgent.

Top three actions ...

a) Help members who are having problems logging in at all. A handful of regular members have irregularities in their accounts and the resetting of access as described earlier in this thread doesn't work for them.  They need to be sorted out individually, and this takes time ... it shows me why there can't be individual manual announcements at every station along a line when there are delays ...

b) Sorting out missing threads and PMs; I know the problem and have the data, but the fix requires a quiet time which I've not had.  I could screw up royally if I get this one wrong!

c) Continuing to use / check the forum myself in all sorts of ways to note other issues.  Reports such as yours here are a huge help in this, as I can't possibly check everything.

In addition to (a) through (c) ...
I'm aware of the "front page" and acronymns issue
Also aware that boards are coming up out of order
and please note that the Coffee Shop is just one of around 20 domains hosted on the server that went south, one of which is commercially key to us.

Worth repeating here: If you've asked for a password reset and not received your reset e-mail check your spam or junk mail filter!

a) Help members who are having problems logging in at all. A handful of regular members have irregularities in their accounts and the resetting of access as described earlier in this thread doesn't work for them.  They need to be sorted out individually, and this takes time ... it shows me why there can't be individual manual announcements at every station along a line when there are delays .[/color]

And I for one am grateful to Grahame for his guidance - I am probably the original nightmare subscriber when it comes to technology.

OK
+ ... I think all posts are back
+ ... all p.m.s are back
+ ... acronyms are back (though I have kludged them / an issue still to resolve)
+ ... I think I have responded to all emails "help" ... a couple of folks still to confirm that the help has worked

- ... forums and boards still out of original order

Phew!

P.S.  Thanks, Roger ... delighted to provide the support.  But have a huge backlog of other things to do over the weekend after this whole business.   Not done badly to be where we are after 48 hours!

Again, grahame, many thanks for your efforts.

Actually, I rather like the new order of boards and topics on the Coffee Shop forum - is that something we could possibly keep, as an indirect benefit of recent events (with our members' approval, obviously) ? :)

We're now moving from a phase of immediate support of getting regular ("daily") members back online - people who were very much aware of the problems as they happened - to supporting and informing less frequent folks who may come back once or twice a month and be very much unaware that the forum has been moved in - err - a bit of a rush.   So I've consolidated the information and advise into a new thread ... which is at the top and sticky on "Intro and Chat"

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=12547.msg134586#msg134586

I am also making this "assistance" thread sticky for a while ...

Apprectiation to Grahame for his efforts in restoring the Forum.  I'm an occasional poster, but daily reader, and really enjoy the various debates (and frequesnt humour!),so thanks to all for that.

Pb

Thanks to graham for sorting out our log in problems.

Mookiemoo and the flyingscotsman are grateful!

I've updated my email address but can definitely say the auto emails for password still not right - not in junk mail or main mail.

Oh well, I doubt I'll need it until the next time the servers get trashed

Graham,
After all your heroic efforts, which are much appreciated, it seems rather churlish to even point out as a curiosity that the "Total time logged in:" display is showing silly numbers. I think (in my case at least) it always shows 7 days plus the hours since 9 pm yesterday. Of course that takes us back before this instance of the forum was born, which is odd in itself.

Not of great importance, unless it's s symptom on something internally out of kilter.

Stuving and others ... very much thank you for all your support through this, and returning to the forum so quickly.

Now that the immediate flurry is over, we can pick up odd little things; some will be fixable, others explainable, others we may need to live with.   General plans were to replace the forum software itself at the start of the new franchise - even "Firstgreatwestern".info may not have been current any longer; as it is, we're still running with some older code elements as well as the new; this makes fixes trickier sometimes.

The "time logged in" has been building up from day 1 of the previous server and was transferred as the part of the database.   There are some of us who hide the time we've been here from our nearest and dearest as the figures are rather larger than they appreciate.   So you're recorded from login to logout.   If you leave the site and fail to log out, it will be guessed that you remained on the final page for (??) minutes and that added to your time.

So ... if you're navigating around and see that the time is "7 days plus odd hours and minutes from 9pm last night", that's reasonable.  Pop down the pub for a hour, come back and look at another page, and you'll probably find it's 7 days plus odd hours and minutes from 9:45 last night.

Let me know if that (and what it shows today) matches what you see ... it's not a huge worry in this case; as you say, even if wrong it's more of a quirk and I don't think it's masking anything sinister

Thanks folks, found the re-set email in Google's junk. Now working fine (obviously!)

Thank you Graham. You and your fellow site administrators have done a very good job in providing this unique forum dedicated to the GreaterWestern Rail franchise. I have learnt a lot from the forum over the past few years of the peculiarities  of the rail system that help to explain why certain things run in the way the do and I suspect that many rail staff (TOC & NR) may have appreciated some of the work but perhaps not welcomed the throwing of light onto some of the absurdities. Long may you thrive.

I've given up and registered as a new user but if it's possible to get my original 'noddingdonkey' back that'd be great!

I'm sorry you've had such a problem.   I'll resolve this so that you can use the old account later this evening.

Thanks Grahame! I did send you an email but I guess you've had loads!

Simon

I have sent you an email to the new address giving you a password ...

I previously reset at 22:17 on 14th June and emailed you; not sure why that failed.

I have closed this second account too - we're pretty strict on multiple identities because of past problems



Edit note: One punctuation mark inserted, purely for clarity! ::)

Thanks, Chris ... doing this from an intermittent connection and a series of train changes.  I'm surprised there was only one mistake!

So was I - that's quite good, for you!  ;) ;D

Hooray! Thanks Grahame-am now back with correct login!

With the server change last June, there was a major change in the underlying operating system, program language and database versions (and by "major" I mean huge).  And a couple non-critical but non-wanted effects crept in.

Thanks to a suggestion from bobm, I've been able to improve an issue with avatars, which have been cut down to postage stamp size when uploaded recently.    Fresh uploads will now resize to a maximum of 153 x 153 pixels, rather than the 65 x 65 that has been used for the past 9 months or so. There remains an issue with images hosted on your own server, which may display distorted if they're not of the correct size / aspect ratio.

It seems that the old server was just letting anything through due to the lack of image resizing software in the background; the new server has that software so a latent configuration error was exposed when we upgraded.

Yay. Thanks grahame and bobm for whatever was done to give us back larger avatars. I've celebrated by bringing back IKB.

 ;D