Happy 5th Birthday to the Forum - belated

[p310don]

I was just going through some stuff from the archives and realised that this forum turned 5 the other day.

December 2 2019 the forum's first member joined, @rockedge ! Also the forum's creator, admin and main man.

Followed a few days later by the first early adopters of this renegade forum, me getting pipped by @wiak by an hour to be number 2. At that time, the old murga-linux forum was still running. Due to the untimely passing of that forum's owner, John de Murga 5 month's later, this forum became the new home for Puppy.

It's not the same as the old forum, Puppy's not the same, the world isn't the same, and certainly the internet & IT isn't the same as it was just those few years ago, but there are many here who were there, and I still come visit every day to see what's going on, catch up and be a part of this community.

Thanks Erik rockedge for your continued contributions in hosting this forum, and happy birthday (albeit a few days late) to the forum!

[Xyz]

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[rockedge]

This version of the Puppy Linux Discussion Forum was setup around the time the murga-linux.com was beginning to fail and no one really had the full administration to address that. The original was a phpBB2 board running on an Apache 2.2 server, old MySQL, and PHP5 on a rented virtual computer server in Singapore. The entire system was in need of serious upgrades and the forum web site some maintenance. This could not happen and the early signs were new registration failed because of the email functions stopping. Email server was never made really SSL capable and now couldn't work any longer, so no new registrations. That led to notifications system failing to work. The lack of a SSL certificate for the murga server and the domain murga-linux.com was beginning to exclude it's operation from the newer and newer browsers.

So diagnosing that we had a serious problem I went ahead and set up a new phpBB3 board on a new professionally hosted server that I already had room on to do it. Once it was clear, we were able to negotiate and with the generous help from John Murga's widow, we gained access to the virtual machine to download the forum software and a MySQL database dump for later reconstruction. That later became the conversion miracle from phpBB2 to phpBB3 with that large gap of versions in between to overcome. I managed to make the conversion work for over 1.4 million posts. The domain names were transferred and a new hosted server was setup with the domain names pointing to it. I transferred the new forum (renegade) to the new server, setup the oldforum alongside and made the configuration so that the old http://murga-linux.com links will still work and link to the correct target in the now version phpBB3 oldforum.

Got a lot of help along the way to get where the forum is today. The oldforum (murga-linux.com) is a gold mine of information, and still loaded with relevant tidbits of code examples and stocked with ideas.

[bigpup]

@rockedge

Thank you very, very, very, much, that you did make this forum!!!!!!!

Hope you will be around and keep it going, for the forum's 10TH birthday party!

Maybe you can power it with solar by then!
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[ozsouth]

A great, well-timed achievement. Well done, rockedge!

[Amol]

Happy birthday to the forum

[Chelsea80]

@rockedge

You kept that quiet.

Congratulations on your 5th year of being the super glue that's kept this Forum together

Well done you.

[keniv]

@rockedge
Yes, Happy (belated) Birthday and thanks for all you've done for this forum from an almost everyday user of it and puppy.

Regards,

Ken.

[mikewalsh]

Yes, indeed; happy birthday to the forum, and many - and heart-felt - thanks to Erik.....for all his tireless hard work over the years. It IS very much appreciated.....and gives us old farts somewhere to socialize (!!)

Way to go, man. Good on yer...

Mike.