Why The FMCA Forum Was Down So Long

[larrypennington]

Hello Members!

From the feedback we have received so far it looks like the FMCA Forums rebuild has been a success.

Because of the inconvenience we would like to take this chance to explain why things took so long. Around last Sunday 04/23/2017 we started to notice issues with the web server that hosted the forums and how it was randomly just going offline.

Usually with computers when this kind of thing starts to happen it means that a piece of hardware is going bad.

As we were diagnosing issue the web server just died.

We had backups of the forums and the database so we were confident that we could get a new server setup within a day or two at most and get the forums back online, but we ran into a major snag after loading everything up on to the new server. The forum software that we run that was previously purchased from invisionpower.com would not come online.

After much research of the vague error code we were receiving we found out that the software had shut itself down because it recognized it was on a different web server than the one it previously existed on and it deactivated itself.

The only thing we could do at this point (which was on Tuesday evening) was to reach out to the software manufacturer and ask why they had deactivated our license.

So we looked up their website and there was no phone number listed to call them only a ticketing system for us to email them if there was an issue. We put in a request for someone to contact us immediately about why the our forums deactivated itself.

The next day a developer for the company responded to us and told us that the forum software had shut itself down because it thought we were trying to run it on two servers and that we had only purchased a single license and that out software key was made invalid, and that we would have to be contacted by someone in their accounts department so they could issue us a new software license to reactivate the software.

Over the next two days we heard nothing from the accounts department at invisionpower.com, we sent many emails to them and posted many tickets begging them for resolution.

Finally on Friday 04/28/2017 after 4pm EST we got a message from the supposed CEO of the company that said that they were going to reissue the license.

After they did we installed the new license and the software reactivated itself and we were able to bring the forums back online.

No one in our current IT Department was working for the company when FMCA started using the invisionpower.com forums so we did not know how troublesome dealing with them actually was.

Sometimes when using third-party software you find yourself in a position where your hands are tied and you have to work on the time table of the company that you purchased the software from. And that is what happened to us here, believe me if there was any way that we could have got things up and running faster we would have, we love our jobs and hate to disappoint anyone.

So in closing we want to apologize to everyone, and promise you that we have added failsafe’s to our forum environment so we never have to deal with invisionpower.com for customer service again.

Thanks,
Your Web Team