Call me Grim. Any pronouns. I play the Sims games, almost exclusively the Sims 2. I'm a maxis match player and a premade fan. WCIF friendly. Random conversation friendly. ♢ Narrative Neighborhoods: Belladonna Cove Round 1 Euroville Round 1 Nekojima Round 1 Strangely Pleasant Round 1 Swapped Strangetown Round 1 ♢
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Nervous ( Nyon ) loves his new family. Who knew commenting on a conspiracy forum will get you a boyfriend and his cute alien baby. Now you are the father that stepped up!!
Well it wasn’t just me, to be fair. I would have never been able to without @fireflowersims help and HugeLunatics trust in both of us. Thank you to both of them for their work and thank you @teaaddictyt for reaching out and doing the more public communication.
I’m super happy I got the chance to work to fix it. It wasn’t an easy undertaking. It seemed like every little thing would cause more errors, I fixed one and another thing broke. But now it seems stable, finally.
A lot of technical stuff below the cut, beware.
Fixing such an old forum is not easy. Documentation is rather sparse because the framework it runs on is old. There is however a more modern version, but updating is difficult. Here was the issue for the forum - upgrading failed.
A website (usually) consists of two different parts: 1 - The files. They contain the code, scripts, designs, images, attachment, profile pictures etc. 2 - The database. The database connects all the different parts and tells the website where to find something. Everything gets stored in tables, assigned IDs and given values. Everything written, each post and topic is also stored in the database. So without the database the whole page would be useless.
It was clear from the beginning that the database was the culprit for the failed upgrades. I got an earlier backup from HL and started working.
I set up a local environment with two versions of XAMPP. One running on php 7.4 (the last version having compatibility for the forum framework version and the upgrade script to the recent version) and the other on a modern 8.3, which was the same as the version the server @fireflowersims set up for GOS.
I ran the upgrade script (which consists of 4 separate parts) on the old backup and ran into errors right away. The script would just outright crash on me, most often without a log or message. The (local) server would just stop responding. My original plan had been to upgrade to version 2.0 first, then 2.1, since it was the recommended order. However the database backup had already been partly upgraded to 2.1. That was the reason my upgrade script failed. Reversing those changes could have been a possibility but extremely time intensive.
(This is the frontpage of the upgrader. I stared at it so much. Like you can see it has a ton of steps)
Instead I asked for the current database and HL provided it to me. This one was already further along on the upgrade and I could see the error HL had run into before handing over. I had to look at the upgrade scripts and source php files to diagnose what the framework was expecting - and failing - to find in the database.
That’s where I found the main culprit for *most* of the errors: Time tables. The framework saves every action that a user does in a log, a long table with the action, an id and a date. This was where everything had gotten wrong. The upgrader expected to see one column for the date, named *day*, while the current table had a different column for day, month and year. I tried fixing the table at first but that didn’t seem to work, so I completely deleted the table and created a new empty one myself. (By now I think the issue stems from forgetting to uninstall certain packages before upgrading, more on that later)
That was possible because the log actually doesn’t hold relevant information for the forum to work. It just records each step, probably for moderation purposes. Once I had done that step the upgrade script was finally able to proceed.
There were a few more errors where I had to look at what the script was doing, find the corresponding code in the sources and edit the database myself. Thankfully the code is relatively well commented and named, so I was able to find what I needed.
Finally I got the upgrade script to run to the end and I was actually able to open the forums (local) page. I hadn’t been able to for now so it was a first. But a lot of stuff was still missing, like all the topics. I could see that the posts were back, but not sorted correctly.
The fix was simple but annoying. The forum framework comes with a repair_setting.php file which I had run several times to fix all the paths, but apparently it didn’t fix *all* of them. So back to the database I went, ran some queries and fixed them myself.
Then the forum finally worked again!
(This is what the forum looked like when I first opened it. It ONLY had recent posts)
(The working local forum, no files yet with the default theme. Seems wrong to look at GOS without the dark theme, right?)
There were still a few things I needed to fix but the database seemed to work fine now. I had never done so many queries in my life. I know SQL, and had to fix databases before but not this intensely. So I guessed I learned something new haha.
Next was the exciting step to upload my clean install to the server. @fireflowersims and I had some directory issues, but I was able to fix them manually once again.
Then I had to take a look at the files which mostly consist of avatars and attachments. They didn’t work at all once moved to the clean install. Once again I took a look at the code and realized that the upgrade script would have changed those files as well, but because I ran it on a clean install it didn’t actually do this step.
I didn’t want to run the upgrade script again, worried that it would mess up a now working database. Instead I wrote a script myself that sorted through all the attachments, looked for the IDs of the avatars from the database so it could move and rename them.
Last were the attachments. This was an easier fix. They just had to be given the ending .dat. @fireflowersims ran a command through the console and then the attachments worked too!
We were getting closer!
Next was the theme. The old theme didn’t work on the modern framework anymore so @fireflowersims looked for a new one which I customized with CSS, trying to get it closer to the way the forum looked before. I think it turned out quite alright, hope you guys think so too!
(Trying to find out what CSS class addresses what? Make everything red and green!)
(All the spider webs)
Next was packages, or mods, to the framework. Fire and I encountered some hiccups here too, since there were some leftovers in the database. The packages hadn’t been properly deinstalled before running the upgrade script, which was another source of the errors. I tried fixing them manually but one of the packages would continue to just break the site no matter what I tried, so we settled for an alternative.
Some more work was put into SSL and making the forum secure. Once again some settings seemed to just break the page and each time I had to go back in the database and manually fix what had gone wrong. It was tedious but by now I knew my way around quite well.
@fireflowersims handled a lot of the server administrative work and DNS settings. I know very little about that part so having @fireflowersims there was great and they made sure the page is reachable at the correct address.
So yeah, I hope the site stays online for a long time now. It’s such a big part of our community and communities history. I used to download so much from there when I was younger. I wanted to give back to the community I love so much. That was the reason I spent many many hours digging through code and old forum threads.
Jules, I cannot emphasize enough just how cool you are for having done all of this work to get GoS back online! I'm glad I was able to provide a good new space for GoS to live from now on and assist with all the DNS. It was a trip alright, and I'm glad we could work together on this!
You are a hero and I (and I bet so many others) am so grateful for your skill and dedication! ♥️
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I need everybody to stop, pause, make some really tight fists with their hands, now shake them out.
Now breathe in, all the way. Hold it - 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - now breathe out. Now do that twice more.
There are still efforts going on behind the scenes to get GOS back online (and Sims 2 Artists).
New hosting has been secured. The website php needs upgrading and this has not been working, but people are still working on it.
I know its hard when things happen and you don't know what's going on. But please, everyone, just calm down. Instead of panicking, jumping to conclusions, making angry posts, just chill, wait, breathe. Be kind, ask what's happening without getting mad.
And please, remember kindness and empathy. Lunie has been trying to update GOS for months, and she is exhausted. It's down right now, but not dead (yet).
First, I'm happy to hear this, and I want to thank those working behind the scenes on this, and to appreciate the tremendous effort hosting this website must have taken over many, many years.
That said, the issue people have is with the lack of communication. Were this just someone's personal website that only they contributed to, that would be one thing, but GOS especially is such a community effort that the lack of effective and transparent communication through this process was always going to create this perfect storm of tension in the community. At the very least, we must sympathize with the many creators who, knowing nothing of what's going on behind the scenes, have had to take steps to figure out how they can ensure everyone has access to the content they originally shared on GOS. It created work and confusion for the people who help to keep the community on GOS alive.
A lot of this was, speaking plainly, entirely avoidable had there been a greater effort to communicate and spread information, and perhaps to provide periodic updates. This could reasonably be argued to be a burden. I'm sure questions would have poured in, as they have over these last couple of days. That's where members of the community, had they been in the know, could have supported the process, by being the PR team.
I hope that when all is said and done, regardless of whether GOS can be restored or not, we're able to grow from this moment as a community. While we should all be aware of how we get sucked into internet discourse and the impact that has on real people, this community, in general, is extremely positive, supportive, and understanding, and that we see much more frustration in this situation should indicate a need for reflection on what happened, or didn't happen, that created stress, confusion, and grief responses.
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To me it's so important that none of the Grunts realise that Lyla's actually dead.
I feel a lot of people overlook it but it adds to the misery that is their household.
Like all three of her sons are hoping she'll come back for them...
Tank is hoping she comes back so he can be himself because he remembers how soft she used to be with him and he's idolised his mother to this near perfect human being. To Tank she's something she never was.
Ripp is hoping she comes back so he can stop fighting. He doesn't want to argue with his dad but knows if he doesn't put up a fight against Buzz's expectations no one else will. Ripp believes his mother will fight for them so he can just be a teenager again.
Buck is hoping he can get to know her. She left when he was so young he barely remembers her and wants her in his life. He remembers her as the only parent that cared for him.
Tragically none of them will get what they want, the only one who does is Buzz.
And Buzz is terrified Lyla will come back for their sons. He's spend the better part of a decade trying to mould his sons and control them. He might not like Tank, but Tank has met some of his expectations, Tank's desperation for Buzz's approval will have him joining the military in the blink of eye if it means Buzz will be happy. And Lyla could come back a ruin it all, for all he knows Lyla's spent years getting her shit together so she can win custody of them when she couldn't initially.
But because she's dead she never will, so Buzz can keep being Buzz. Buzz can keep torturing his sons physically and mentally because they just need to "toughen up." And the boys just have keep dealing with it until they're old enough to get out of there (but if the Sims 2 for PSP is to be believed, they never will).
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