Virtualmin.com pre-migration

News
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Howdy all,

Just a heads up that I’m taking advantage of the long weekend to finish development of the new site. It’s not quite finished, but it’s close enough that I’m pretty confident it’ll be ready by this afternoon, and so I’ll be putting the Virtualmin.com site into read-only mode (and probably maintenance mode or completely offline some of the time) while I migrate the users, docs, recent issues, and licenses. Some aspects of the migration may run into Tuesday (7/6), in particular with regard to links and licenses, but I hope to be able to turn the new site on by Monday night.

This is a major overhaul, with all new components and so there will likely be some quirks and some broken bits, and the actual license subscriptions probably won’t make it over immediately; but we’ll be able to accept new orders again, and I’ll sort out how to bring those old orders into the new system with time. Might not even happen until next weekend, as I have a busy week at my other job, too.

Just to let you know what to expect:

Docs and subscriptions/licenses will be handled by a WordPress site with WooCommerce and a few custom modules I’ve been working on. Users will migrate mostly unchanged; your old username and password will continue to work. Account links will change, but I’ll try to make sure the big ones keep working (like the licenses page).

The support issue tracker at Virtualmin.com will be replaced by private messages here at the forum. There is a @staff group, to which customers can send private messages; only Eric, Ilia, Jamie and I will have access to those messages. Some of the old issues from Drupal will be migrated…but not all, probably just the last year or so of open tickets. I don’t know how well the PM system will work with thousands of messages, in terms of our ability to organize and respond, so I’m going to keep it manageable while we deal with all the other fallout from a total revamp of the site. The old site will stick around in some sort of archived read-only state for an indeterminate period of time, so we’ll have the ability to dig up old stuff if needed.

The site will be a little plain and ugly for a while, but a lot of things that never worked in Drupal will actually work in the new site; stuff like users managing their own subscriptions. You’ll be able to upgrade and downgrade licenses, cancel your own subscriptions, pay with PayPal or credit card (PayPal never worked right for subscriptions in Drupal Commerce, so it was never available).

So, please be patient with me for another day or so while I get the site migrated over, and then for a few more days while I fix everything that’s broken on the new site.

Cheers,
Joe

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OK, so, I underestimated by a small margin the remaining development work, and while the development work is done enough to launch (finally!), I’m going to put off the migration one more day so I’m not starting it so after 10PM. The migration takes several hours, due to a 1.5GB database and a bunch of manual steps that I couldn’t figure out how to automate in a reasonable time, so I don’t want to start it after 10PM, knowing I have to be up pretty early tomorrow morning.

So, the migration will begin tomorrow evening. But, it’s definitely happening then!

Cheers,
Joe

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Cannot wait man, I’m so anxious! Finally update on your side - and thanks for little user like me out there. We all know big things have small beggings :+1:t2:

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Alright, I’m switching the old Drupal site to read-only mode for the next…4-6 hours, starting now. It’ll probably be offline completely for a little while during that time, as well, but I’m hopeful that by about 1AM CST we’ll be on the new site entirely.

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Oh, and the forum will continue to be accessible throughout this process; read-only mode in Drupal does not prevent logging in, it just prevents editing anything.

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Argh. Things went…poorly.

The Drupal site is live again, while I sort out a bug in the Drupal-to-WordPress importer…I realized that it doesn’t bring over book pages, and all of our docs are in book pages (500 of them!). So, I’ve filed a ticket with the author of the plugin about that, and hopefully will have it sorted soon (I can probably hack around it but not at midnight). That plugin also only works once…after one attempted import, it never works again on the same WordPress instance, even after deleting the content it imported.

In short, I’m tired, have to wake up early tomorrow, and don’t know how to proceed to get over this hump…so, I’ll try it again tomorrow evening.

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That’s shitty to say the least.
Thanks for the heads up. I know you want to proceed with the page, but better not put too much stress on yourself. :slight_smile:

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Best of luck @Joe ! We really love your products and your efforts, and we can’t wait to upgrade our Virtualmin licenses. All the best !

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Are you using the FP Drupal to Wordpress plugin? If not, you should be. It does pages, stories, catagories, the whole lot.

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I am, but it’s not quite working (and it doesn’t handle any of the custom stuff we had on the old site, as expected). I’ve got an open support ticket with them about the book pages, and they’ve been responsive, but it’s not sorted yet.

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if all support is going to goto pm i think that’s going to be an organizational nightmare for you folks…although if you have it able to auto sort into folders based of priority it may work. However unless it’s a shared box then all messages will be in triplicate and then all three of you have to close them out inside your own box. I am curious if you could use something like bbpress for the paid side kinda like you have another section of the site for pro users. Otherwise something like bugzilla, flyspray or womehting else for tracking and management might work?

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Priority and categories haven’t been very useful in the other issue tracker (and I think I even removed priority, or at least tried to). Everyone considers their issue the highest priority, so it’s just data we can’t usefully use. Collecting data without everyone understanding what all the fields mean has been counter-productive. It’s just noise for us and friction for people filing tickets where they try to figure out what to put in all the fields (Priority=Double Plus Urgent!!!1! is the only easy field, everything else makes them think about it). We really just need the OS and version and relevant logs; the former we can ask for as part of the message template and the latter was never something that could fit into the fields on the issue tracker.

Given how buggy, slow, and clunky, Drupal project_issue has been for us, I can’t imagine PMs in Discourse will be worse. We can mark things “Solved” which is pretty much the only piece of data I care about; if it isn’t solved, it’s still needing attention. There are other tools for categorizing/sorting/whatever, though I don’t know what that’ll look like. But, it doesn’t matter to users because they’ll just have their own issues to worry about, and most people only have a small number. So, we’ll figure it out. And, Discourse is super nice to work with and extend. I’m not afraid of having to customize it, if it comes to that…whereas I learned to dread having to touch Drupal code. I was always at least as likely to break something as help.

In short: I’m confident I’ll enjoy answering tickets in Discourse more than in Drupal. That’s the primary concern. If more people get answers faster, it is an improvement over what we have now, no matter how much we give up in ticket tracking niceties. We considered a lot of other options, and I spent a lot of time evaluating them (I installed literally a half dozen issue trackers over the past year or two trying to figure out what to move to…in the end, we like using Discourse more than anything else we’ve tried).

bbpress is just another forum app. We’re very happy with Discourse. (And, it would be possible to add a paid support category that is visible to all Pro users. But, I don’t know how much benefit that would directly help users, but it might be a motivation for more users to send us a little money, which might be worth doing since when we make money we’re able to make the software better. Most people who want to use the issue tracker do so because they want the conversation to be private, which private messages provides.)

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I never cared for bbpress at all. In the end my forum site runs Xenforo. It’s very good at what it does.

Discourse is quite good as well. The thing I never liked about discourse is its mobile layout. That’s the only reason I went with Xenforo.

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Hello Joe,

The well-wisher…

I only registered this account because I am a coward (this has happened in the past, hahaha), :-), I would say, you’re pretentious…hmmmmmmmmm
(because you’re acting weird, but I know you don’t want to - you are smart but you are not the smartest remember this)

Trolls live on the moon, f…ck.

Seriously can’t you be a bit more friendly, you’re not the smartest person in the world, it would go a lot better if you were cooperative…

-your crude, condescending comments are not helping anyone… man???

I see your work, it’s super good, but your brain is gone…

First: you can’t focus on two things at once, work and hobbies (this folk) being who we are (Webmin, Virtualmin, etc.)

Please open your eyes and do one thing, but do it well and we will pay you…

you’ve had no income (money) for months because you’ve been bullshitting with foolish migration…
(BTW: a 14 year old (hacker) kid today could have done this in 10 minutes)

Take this as a positive criticism, I’ve been with you for years, but go for it, do something great, don’t just tease us…

Dude I can’t service my partners for months because there is no license option, give me your bank account and I’ll transfer

Please take it seriously, so far this is a BS.

Again, no offense, but this is frivolous, you’re losing confidence.

Of course delete the post :slight_smile:
(you always do when you are criticized) :tired_face:

PS:
Yahhhh, delete this fucking account, enough if a few people have already seen it, this is the solution I might throw PRTSC on Twittttterrrr too :slight_smile:

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image

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Sorry you’re frustrated. I am, too. And, I’m tired. I work two jobs; one of them pays me, the other one (Virtualmin) hasn’t really paid me in a few years. If I only focus on one thing, as you suggest, Virtualmin dies. So, I don’t consider that an option.

And, I’m sorry my intended joke about issue priorities seemed more “asshole” than “funny”. I see how it’s not the best tone to take about issues that genuinely are very important and urgent to the person dealing with them. Once again, I’m frustrated and tired; not in the best of spirits lately. I’ll just try to take my own advice and not respond when I’m feeling like saying something grouchy.

I edited your comment to remove abusive language about another user. You can rant at me all you want, within reason, but don’t be abusive to others; this is your one warning (though I guess you don’t care about this particular account).

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It actually was funny.
Because simply most people here either know about support and how some users/customers are behaving or simply because they have a good sense of humor and understood it.

I can understand that some users are not happy if they don’t get the help they ask for, but again … most seemingly don’t understand the concept of that.
It is still not a nice way or better to say mature way to register here (most likely a dummy account with that name) and just go full rude / insulting against people (or even the little threat at the ending … nice one obvious sarcasm). There is always a way to handle things more mature.

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Halllooo,

Hey Man,

I’ll start with this ;-):

Hey @Joe don’t let me down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXwMrBb2x1Q

Thank you that was a fair reaction, I had no idea you could do that… :slight_smile:
I understand that you removed my comment about it… @unborn

We in the FreeBSD community (because I deal with it on a daily basis) would have thrown such a guy out long ago, because his answer is not purposeful, he just trolls with his knowledge…and apologies again…

Pls. look, seriously, anyone who comes to your site is here for work, we don’t want stupid comments, it’s a waste of time

(it is not knowledge if you keep saying how clever you are)
fu…k we’re all smart, because we’re here and we’re not ordering fake nails from a catalogue, sorry :slight_smile:

It’s IT :slight_smile: and it’s evolving so fast that there’s no time for stupid comments, if you’re sympathetic and / or… PM we’ll continue, but the community benefits if you give purposeful answers.

Please come and visit for example the FreeBSD or pfSense, etc. (not relevant only FreeBSD) forums (this is not an advertisement), you can meet me there too, but with a different approach.

I’ll start again from the beginning, I love your work, but make it part of your life, you can’t do business on one foot.

We’re the ones who can help you and you can help us, pls. buddy :slight_smile:

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Somehow, I don’t feel helped by this exchange.

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Because you were trolled again with that post.

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