Okay, this what happened.
The website was experiencing a lot of downtime and it was being caused by the forums. This website runs on
Joomla, and the forum used to run on
SMF. To sync these two things together I used a forum bridge.
Recently Joomla changed its license to adhere to a strictly GPL Open Source policy. This made many developers angry, and as a result many developers stopped working on their Joomla projects. The forum bridge stopped releasing updates and there is almost no support anymore.
Because of this, I decided to migrate to a different forum system, one that was incorporated directly into the Joomla framework. I decided to use
Fireboard.
On the day I put the website offline, I started to make the transition to Fireboard by converting the thousands of messages. I was met with a myriad of problems in the conversion process which constantly kept giving me errors.
This went on for a couple of days and I wasn't sure what to do. Put the site back the way it was? Put up just the website with the forum? Put up the forum without the website? Put up the new forum without the old messages? I wasn't satisfied with any of that, so I decided to take a break for a while.
I built a new computer during the break, and I accidentally lost all of the site data that was on my hard drive, but it was still all online, so that was okay. Some of my graphic and website software like Photoshop stopped working with Windows Vista, and then on top of that, I forgot to pay the bill for the server. That's when the site went down.
With the new smashingpumpkins.com, I started wondering if ThePumpkins.net was really needed in the online community. They had many of the features that we have on this website, and they have the audio files and videos and image galleries, and more users. And I must admit, my enthusiasm for the band just hasn't been the same as it used to be. I wasn't sure what to do.
But when I returned online and saw all of the emails and the new website that Sam started, I saw that people really did miss the website and were thoroughly curious about where I've been. I decided to get back to work. I've gotten past the problems, and the forums are up and working now.
I apologize for my absence and for not replying to the emails. I hope everyone had a good September and October. Let's keep going.
