READ--> IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY UPDATE <--READ

UPDATE
The discussion board portion of ATS has been moved.
Blogs will be moved later today.
UPDATE



Starting this afternoon, we will begin a transition to a new web server.

The new machine has been tested to handle nearly 10x our previous traffic peaks in a simulated load environment (stated quite simply, it kept serving forum pages under conditions equal to 10 times the load that crashed our current server). While this can't accurately replicate real traffic, it's a solid rule-of-thumb for testing a server prior to launch.

Later today (between 2PM and 6PM EST, 6PM and 10PM GMT), the discussion board will move to the new server in anticipation of moving the entire site. This way, we will easily retain all existing posts and threads during the time it takes to transition the domain to the new name servers.

In addition, we will be soon launching the ability for members to purchase e-mail accounts in the ATS store. The new server should allow for additionally more robust anti-spam and anti-virus utilities. You will be able to purchase e-mail accounts under one of these two domains:

[email protected]
[email protected]

Over the next week, those of your with @abovetopsecret.com e-mail accounts will receive e-mails with your new password and access information to use on the new e-mail server.

Also, during the next two weeks, we will begin moving the abovetopsecret.com domain to the new domain name servers. Before this happens, we'll post a direct-access IP address for members to use who encounter brief outages during the transition (it can, and does happen, and we know you need your ATS fix!).



Managing the technology of ATS has been a challenging task these past 5 months. (If it wasn't for the quality of our members, and the significance of our topics, I probably would have thrown my hands in the air 4.5 months ago. ) It's been an amazing sequence of events from my vantage point... as soon as we enabled better performance and site features, our site traffic began to rise at a rate of about 15% every week. Now, we're functioning at the capacity of our first Pentium4 dedicated server. It'll be interesting to see what happens when we move to a Dual Xenon (yup, two processors) server with vastly improved database software. It really does seem that if you build it, they will come.

[Edited on 4-10-2003 by William]

"Over the next week, those of your with @abovetopsecret.com e-mail accounts will receive e-mails with your new password and access information to use on the new e-mail server."

Thanks for the heads-up William.
Question: How long will we have access to our @abovetopsecret.com accounts when this change-over happens or is complete. I rarely check my account...roughly one in two or three days.

Thank you again for the heads-up.

regards
seekerof

Thanks for the heds up william.

A million thanks for all your efforts.

Looking forward to that email address @hotmail sucks ass.

For the time being... the discussion board portion of ATS is functioining under denyignorance.com/forum until the entire ATS site and domain can be moved to the new machine.

Well it sure seems to be quicker..

Header data processed in 0.005 seconds
Page processed in 0.082 seconds

Is the chat still working???

Yeah.. this machine rocks... it should be able to give ATS gigantic elbow room to grow.

I'm working on Chat... the PHP version on the new server is upgraded from our previous version... and that crappy chat software has some old code that's not working right.

Originally posted by ilovepizza
Is the chat still working???

Nope doesnt seem like it,it chucked me out earlier couldnt get back in...

This rocks.

Thanks William for the effort.

Yeah great work William and thanks for your efforts in making this site so great

Although I have one question, some of our avatars are not functioning, do we have to change the path to our pictures if we uploaded them? Or will it go back normally after a few server tweaks?

For some reason the uploads images didn't get included in the massive site tar archive. I think because a couple of the older ones have illegal characters that screwed things up.

It's being corrected now.

Also, blogs and news are going to be funky until later today.

Hmm..upload doesn't seem to be working for me.

Originally posted by William
For some reason the uploads images didn't get included in the massive site tar archive. I think because a couple of the older ones have illegal characters that screwed things up.

It's being corrected now.

Also, blogs and news are going to be funky until later today.

Thanks.

I also noticed that the Boards Timezone has been changed. Not that it bothers me a great deal :p Any chance of an option in the near future, maybe in the store, for a regional Timezone option? Or are the posts permanently time-stamped in the databases?

You can alter your timezone offset in your profile... but I'm attempting to get it back to GMT.

For some reason, the server's sendmail configuration stopped working properly. Members are not getting e-mail notification of threads, nor user passwords in the event you forgot them.

I'm still working on it.

Any improvements will make this a better experience for all of us, thanks.

I thought that this site worked quite fast before but growth must always be considered.

Certainly this site is faster than others I have frequented.

When is the address going to be back at ATS.com?

Or is it going to be?

Just wondering..

Okay... whew...

Mail is working.

The main site is, and always will be abovetopsecret.com
denyignorance.com will always work from this point forward, but will only offically be used during this transition

William, I can't beleive it took you THIS LONG to do this! What the hell are you doing up there?!

I CAN'T BELEIVE THE SITE WAS DOWN!!!! I think you should get your pay DOCKED for this insolence!!! I think you are a screw up!

Who LOVES YA?! WE DO!

Nice work old man... Now go sip a single malt and RELAX will ya?

PEACE...
m...