Good luck indeed!
*packs Smarch up into magical pink boxes*

Thank you, all! :)

Did you intend for the address to be http://69.195.88.81/forum/(etc.)? That's what's coming up for me.

And part of the bizarreness just happened to me again: when I posted that last message, I was taken back to the old boards. But coming back here I see it posted to the correct place. Gah.

Okay, I'm off to go make the DNS switch and do some admin here on the new board location. Hopefully this stuff clears up after that.

*crosses fingers more*

yay! I wasn't redirected that time. So that's something. heh.

LOL. I'm not either, and I'm only barely passing for one here.

I will say I have learned a great deal more going through all this.

But we should be good now... I hope. It may take a little while for everything to finish resolving, but I have toggled the DNS to point tadwilliams.com to this new server -- and it can take up to 48 hours for the new server info to be propagated throughout the internet. But for all intents and purposes, the new site is live.

As far as the site itself goes, there's still a ton of stuff I'm working on getting posted and tweaked. The structure is there for the most part, but I'm going through the process of adding all the old news and blog posts and the rest of the content. The old site was based on asp.net and was pretty much a custom-build by Baytech -- and most of what they did was not standard and didn't validate.  The new site is php based, and uses WordPress as a platform. There's no real easy way of just copying over the old posts and pages to the new site, so it's pretty much a manual process -- but that I can handle. But because of the very short notice I had and just a matter of weeks to get all this done (set up an entire new website not to mention get the message boards moved), we're having to go live before all the site pages and posts are loaded. And since I work a regular 9-5 type job, all this is done in just the spare time I can scrounge together. But this weekend is a holiday, so that means a bit of extra time to get as much done as possible.

As for the problem with the boards, I'm not sure I can fully explain my error. The idea was to have the old boards stay in maintenance mode until these new boards were active. While the board was in maintenance mode, no new posts would be added to the database, and we could then move all the tables intact without losing any data. (And, thanks once again to Baytech, getting the MB tables ready to move was not a straight-forward process of just exporting then importing. I won't go into the details, but it was a very manual effort -- and thank goodness for Aan, who, while on vacation and having limited wifi access, was still able to hold my hand through the process. Without him, this would still be a mess! 

Anyway, I had a false start on getting the databases transferred Sunday (I had some faulty tools I was using), so Monday saw a complete do-over. (And wow, this database is HUGE! We've sure talked a lot in the 10 years we've been on these boards. Heh.) But the second time appeared to be a success.

The main problem I encountered after getting the data transferred was that the boards here on the new site told me I was not logged in, and that it was in Maintenance mode, so I couldn't log in. And here I get a little fuzzy about what happened, but I knew I was still logged in on the old boards (which were also in Maintenance mode), so I went and took those boards out of maintenance to see if I could log in over here. I know, that makes no sense, but it actually worked. I was able to log in here. And looking in the admin area, I saw that the base url for the boards here was still pointing to the old boards. So I tried to update it. And in updating it, it (I think) pulled a redirect stunt and posted the new base url to the old boards' admin area. And that just started the fun. I tried to put the old boards back to their base url, and (I think) that's when it sent that old base url to the /new/ boards. So everything got completely swapped -- and started throwing errors -- and wouldn't let me put either one back into maintenance mode. *sigh*

So, after figuring out where I needed to go and make changes in the database tables themselves and clear the cache, I managed to get the boards here on the new site "fixed". And I'm just holding my breath that everything stays working here.

I unfortunately am unable to make the same fix on the old boards -- I can get into the database table and reset the base url there, but I cannot access the cache files to clear them -- so I am still unable to put those old boards back into maintenance mode. However, I have posted links to these boards in the old Mint topic there, and after all the domain name changes resolve, the old boards will just go poof anyway. Or that's my understanding anyway.

So now I'm having a drink to celebrate (at least a half victory), so if none of this makes sense, blame the rum ;)

I'll be keeping an eye on things and hoping they stay good. And I'll be painting, arranging the furniture, unpacking boxes, hanging curtains, etc., on the website itself for the next few days, too ;)

*hugs* Thank you, cyan. I /do/ need those reminders. And in fact, yesterday afternoon I was feeling so tired that when I got home from the office, I went and took a nap for a couple hours before getting back to things here. 

I'll find some down-time this weekend, too, I promise. You're absolutely correct about the need.

I'm about to re-set the MB base url to tadwilliams.com/forum now. I'm a bit leary of what may happen, but I think I know how to fix it if something else breaks this time.

& yes, the page is probably just not finding the proper directory for the header images; will check into that right away too.  (And these will be redesigned later to have the new menus, etc. -- one of the things I plan for the weekend if not sooner)

okay, the menu on the site points to www.tadwilliams.com/forum now too...

seems okay so far....  (*still crossing fingers*)

Yep, you definitely deserve a nice glass of your favorite wine. Good job.

Thank you -- I think we're looking at/noticing some of the same stuff at about the same time. I just now found the other page templates that needed the same changes to the header, menu, footer areas which included templates for the redirect page, the admin pages, the help page(s) and the maintenance page(s).

Just made the changes, so we'll see what happens when I post this -- ie whether the redirect page is fixed or not....

& next, I need to find where in the settings to remove Baytech's advert that's at the bottom of each page next to the copyright & (on some pages) links to other areas of the boards. It's not in the stylesheet or templates, I looked; but makes more sense it's buried somewhere in the actual punbb settings.

We'll see if I can root it out.... :)

Nope, stupid Baytech "copyright" isn't anywhere in the board settings, so I'll have to dig around in the core files some more....

bbl