After a trillion years of delays, I have slapped up a phpBB forum. You may find it here: https://martiancartel.com/phpbb/index.php

Please register and relive the old days like it was 1999. Something better may come along soon™.

For anyone stumbling across the site you may remember I was attempting to restore the forum with the current version of vBulletin but was not having much luck. I am not a database/mySQL expert nor do I desire to be one so progress had been very slow.

Given the minimal traffic the site was seeing even before this, I have placed this prject on the backburner. I am looking into some alternatives and may eventually go back to trying again but for now the Martian Cartel will be forum-less.

You may yell at me in the comments at your leisure!

I have had too many other priorities to juggle to devote much time to getting the forum restored but it is still ongoing. No ETA yet but soon, perhaps!

As in times past, vBulletin is proving to be my archnemesis.

The updated files have been successfully uploaded but things aren’t connecting together properly, so while I can get to the admin login, that’s where everything stops.

I have conscripted Postal again into helping me take a look at the plumbing but the soonest you might be able to see or use the forum is sometime on Monday, April 18th. Of this year.

Hopefully.

As expected, there have been a few hitches in updating the forum to the current version of vBulletin. Most of the work is done but the forum likely won’t actually be back online and ready until sometime Sunday afternoon(ish).

Thanks to some detective work by Postal, the Martian Cartel forum is now back. Please sound off on its future here:

http://www.martiancartel.com/forum/index.php

The vBulletin database is still intact, though efforts to import it successfully into a new forum have met with Hindenburg-style success thus far.

I am going to try a few more things before declaring the database unrecoverable and hardly any of them involve sacrifices or blood rituals.

As some of you may have noticed, the vBulletin forum that the site automatically redirects to has crashed and gone boom, like certain failed Mars probes.

The site was running a very old version of vBulletin and may have been hacked/died of old age or had something else happen to it. I am not a database expert so the investigation is akin to a surgeon using boxing gloves. Except the surgeon is not really a surgeon, he’s just an intern.

Nonetheless, the site should now redirect to this WordPress blog which will at least provide updates on this undesirable situation.

Further updates soon™.

–Ned