On Saturday May 28 2022 I intend to perform the first of two major version upgrades on the Brass Goggles forum software. I will begin around 12:00 Eastern Daylight Time and, based on my practice run, I expect the process to take around two hours.
Brass Goggles first went online in February 2007 using version 1 of the Simple Machines Forum software. After 15 years that software is now well beyond end-of-life and almost completely unsupported, except for the occasional critical security patch. Certain features, such as embedded YouTube videos, no longer work correctly (or at all.) Further, it has become necessary to change hosts, and the PHP 5 runtime environment required by SMF 1 is simply no longer available. Before we can even think of moving, we must upgrade to SMF 2.0.
What does this mean for you? First of all, the forum will be unavailable during the upgrade process which, as I said, I expect to take around two hours. During that time we will still have
Spare Goggles to fall back on, and I will be tweeting regular progress updates
@vonCorax. Second, when the forum returns it will look very different. The elegant Steampunk theme which Tinkergirl & Co. so painstakingly crafted for us is incompatible with SMF 2.0. We will be forced to switch back to a generic default theme, although I will be able to preserve some few elements of the current theme, such as the gears and the top banner.
Once the upgrade is complete we will begin preparing to move to a new host; I hope to complete this in late June. Once
that is over with, we will be upgrading the software again to the current version, SMF 2.1, and will be able to begin redecorating.
If you have any questions, then by all means this is the place to ask them.
