It's difficult to explain.
Simply, our ISP suggested/wanted to move us from one computer box to another.
Our original/old box - the one we are operating form NOW is a real physical box in a rack in a data centre.
Our ISP moved us to a new box. This new box is actually a virtual box (VM virtual machine). Lots of VMs can live and operate more efficiently and they all sit inside a big box in a virtual world.
The problem came about because for whatever reason, our migration to this new VM box failed. Why
we don't know yet.
Sadly our ISP didn't think to test the new box worked with all our systems.
Everything worked except the green forum you are looking at now.
Arguably the most important bit of the S2C online services.
Our forum runs from a big database that stores everything you see on here and new posts (data) are being added all the time in teal time. To work the forum - to access this database there are many files needed with various setting to interface with the database and then to get the forum to "look" and display what you see there are thousands of files. Everything has to be synchronised and get anything out of sync you get white screens, sometimes with error messages
Our ISP then had to restore everything back into our old server box.
This took them rather a long time
And that's where we are today.
The ISP still want to move us to a VM box.
However - we shall insist that any new server is thoroughly tested and all the apps (apps that run the behind the scene systems) are installed and the settings correct to run our online systems.
I did nothing - all I did was test things and report back what wasn't working and what settings needed changing.
As we all know:
If it ain't broke don't fix it.
The argument for moving to a VM box/servcie is compelling - but is going to be hard to sell after our experience of the past few days.
I know there are keyboard warriors out there who think we - me as webmaster are a load of muppets.
Clearly these knockers have never run online services such as we have. It's easy to mock and poke fun, but they know nothing.
The LRSOC had a similar outage the other week. I have no idea what exactly their problem was.
Back in 2019 we had to start off this version of the forum due to outside influences.
Before that we nearly lost the forum due to a WordPress installation that went wrong.
(we want to install WordPress so we can update our website appearance and we want to integrate our online services with Crossmember (the system that runs our membership processing) so that forum and website access accounts are automatically created when new members join the club.
Lets hope our migration goes well next time we try it.