Look At This Ken

If this forum should go down again and Ken is not back, many of us have a sf membership, and can send private messages from there, even if we do not want to participate in that forum. I am Happyflowerlady almost everywhere but here.

 

That's a good point.

Many of us here have an account at another place called Senior Forums. It has a different "vibe" than here. Some folks are active on both forums, some of us exclusively post here. Even if you don't like the atmosphere there, you can still create an account so you can Private Message folks as an alternative to sharing your email.

My name over there is In The Sticks. I've not posted there in years, but will still get an email notification if someone PMs me there.

 

I had the same thing. I would suspect that if the server got rebooted to bring us back on line, it cleared out some cache, freeing up room for some pics. I'd guess that the underlying issue of space allocation has not been addressed.

 

I won't apologize for the outage because there wasn't anything I could have done about that. Before our hosting company changed hands four times, the hosting account I had and have been paying for was plenty enough to operate the forum, as far as resources go. However, as it changed hands, it was downgraded to something that almost but isn't quite enough to operate the forum efficiently; hence, the outages. This time, it happened during the Christmas season, and the only person with the hosting company who would respond to me with anything helpful wasn't at work.

At the same time, coincidentally, I am sure, I lost access to my Facebook account. When I go through the verifications, it lets me back in but won't let me change my FB password from whatever it is now (which was not one that I had chosen). When I try to change my password, it wants me to verify with a code that it sends to my WhatsApp account; the problem being that I have never had a WhatsApp account, and don't even know what a WhatsApp account is, so I can only assume that the WhatsApp account belongs to whoever or whatever it was that hijacked my Facebook account in the first place.

Once the guy from the hosting company returned to the office, he fixed the problem, but not by giving us more server resources, so I assume we'll have problems again in the future.

When I saw that the site was back up, I didn't log back in right away because, frankly, I was--and am--depressed and didn't want to deal with explanations that I couldn't be sure of or assurances that I wasn't assured of, so I chose to spend my time doing things that I could control.

In communication with the guy at the hosting company, he seems to believe that the server account I am on should be sufficient to operate the forum. However, he also recommends upgrading to a VPN or dedicated server account. But he thinks that updating the forum software should be the first step. I hesitated to do that before because I was--and am--afraid that if the server space won't support the forum as it is, it might crash during an update which--from past experience--I know could be fatal.

As for upgrading to a VPN or dedicated server account, my fear is not that I can't afford it, because it's not that much more expensive, but that I don't know my way around a VPN or dedicated server and am not sure that I won't be getting myself into something that I couldn't figure out. My understanding is that, with a shared account, the hosting company upgrades all of the other programs and databases that are necessary to operate a forum, or any other application, but, with a dedicated server, that might be my responsibility. It probably won't end up being a problem, but I don't know that because I haven't done that.

Then comes the bigger problem, which is that, with Christmas and our recent trip to Baltimore, I'm broke and can't afford to any of this stuff right now. No, I am not begging for money, particularly since I can't guarantee that whatever I might do with it will be successful. In a week or so, I'll be able to afford it, so I am hoping that things will continue to work until then. I will probably go with the updating the software first, and then look at the upgrading the server space, since that's what he had recommended.

I apologize for my absence. I don't have good answers, and I didn't want to have to deal with the complaints and the demands for explanations of things I don't have answers for.

 

Exactly ! Everyone here has been in a panic for the last few days when we realized that you have not been online since December 20th, @Ken Anderson . Part of that time was because the forum was down, but when we didn’t see you after that, we have all been worrying that you were hurt or very sick, or that something had happened to Michelle. (All in the Roll Call thread if you have not found it yet).
We definitely don’t want to lose our beloved forum home here, but even worse, we didn’t want something to have happened to our Fearless Leader……. YOU !
I am so glad that you are okay ! Hoping the depression gets better, that is never any fun to live through, although we all do get that from time to time.