Forum down
Posted by Andrew Hodgkinson Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:48:48 GMT
The recent Rails upgrade has taken out the forum section, despite it being frozen. That means it keeps running on an older version of Rails, so in theory it should be running perfectly…
This will take a while to fix. In the mean time, the rest of the site is running fine. If you see any problems, please lodge a fault in the bugs database or discuss it with comments on this news article. Thanks! :-)
Sorry the forum is still down – I’ve just not had time to look into it in any depth. The preliminary investigation results were quite confusing, so in the mean time I’ve been looking elsewhere to see if anyone else has experienced similar issues.
After a few hours of Google searches, phone calls and IRC chats, I’ve absolutely no idea why RForum fails. It’s probably something very obvious, obscured by extremely strange error messages and unhelpful logging mechanisms. The application almost behaves as if part of it has simply never been run, despite the fact that it’s possible to clearly demonstrate that this section is indeed running. Try to bring RForum up on Rails 1.2.2 and things get even more bizarre; stalemate.
Given the ongoing lack of RForum development, its broken search engine and archaic architecture – archaic in terms of the rate of the Rails framework development, that is – I’m considering a change of application. I like RForum but it’s proving too hard to keep it going.
Top of the list is Beast, a relatively small application which currently only runs on Edge Rails. I’m having a nightmare of a time trying to persuade the new RESTful routes mechanism to understand that the application is not running in the root directory. Rails really doesn’t get on with the concept of not owning the entire world and its been a royal pain in that respect since day one. Once the set of changes needed to fix it were known things went smoothly, but now the routes mechanism has been altered so profoundly that I’m not sure yet whether I can achieve what I need to. And that’s before I’ve even started to think about porting the data over from the old forum into the new database.
Like many Rails applications, Beast doesn’t use e-mail for notifications. It uses RSS instead. Clients ask for updates when they want to know and the server can cache results – this scales better than trying to send out a hundred e-mail messages every time someone adds a comment in a forum. If losing e-mail notification would be the end of the world for you, e-mail “webmaster@riscosopen.org” and complain, before it’s too late!
In a perfect world, Rails would realise that it’s polite to play nice with other things on a Web server and Rails applications would learn to live in subdirectories.
Anyway, all would be good since I could spend Friday looking into this, except I’ve now been called back to client offices for what sounds like yet another “moon on stick by yesterday” sub-project. Joy. Got to pay the bills – so the forum waits. Anyone out there know about Rails and want to help maintain a Web site?!
In the mean time, if you want a forum, you’ll have to hijack news article comments instead
:-DProgress report: Beast prerelease is up on the development server. Took a while to understand the new RESTful routes mechanism in Rails, as far as making it work from non-root paths went. Got there in the end. There’s a lengthy list of bugs to sort first and Hub integration will be tricky. Still, it’s a start.
Should be able to spend a bit of time on this today, at long last.
Getting there. The styling is more or less complete and much of the Hub integration is done. Various bugs to fix still.
Almost done. Final testing, then migration of old forum data, if possible; then it goes live
:)Done, at last! The details are the subject of their very own news posting.