I questioned my decision to pay for the premium gold support, especially after I was kinda ignored for a week, but lately, man, I really feel like I've been getting good support.  One of the developers helped me discover the problem afflicting the forums, everything is on its way to being fixed. :)

Webcomic.net is a bit of a special case.  The original webcomic.net used a mySQL based  forum, which the guy who sold us the domain name didn't know how to use or wasn't given full access to it himself.  He basically just gave me access to a bunch of CSV exports, and that was that.  Only weeks of trying to go through this junk did I realize that I only had a small portion of the overall database, and some of that was corrupt.  We lost a lot of members then, as I'm sure most people don't really care about whats going on behind the scenes. 

At any rate, the new forums were actually pretty decent, had some improvements over the prior forums, a lot of deficiencies though.  So I'm talking to the primary developer, a nice Brit, who appreciates some of the code changes I made to make webcomic.net work, but ultimately falls behind, and we're left with forums that only have part of the necessary features.  Work gets hectic, I start employing Jason, which consumes a lot of my extra resources, and meanwhile, I'm still looking for forum software that has the features I need and supports SQL Server. 

You see, We use SQL Server, a very expensive database server that has a lot of functionality and performance that we use in other areas of our company.  Most if not all of the php-based forums use MySQL.  Why?  Because MySQL is free.  Most people who use forums on their servers, like free.  Its really appealing to them.  They don't mind if they lose a feature here and there.  But I wasn't going to run MySQL and SQL Server on the same box, it just didn't make sense.  So out comes Community Server.  Many people are already seeing some of the amazing features of this product, but we had a whole other set of problems, based on our importing of data from InstantASP forums which imported data from corrupt CSV files.

So basically, we had a lot of bad data, and Community Server, it turns out, is a lot less tolerant of bad data than the prior InstantASP forums.  I spent nearly all of Friday fixing these issues, finally writing a program that goes thread by thread and fixes it to conform to the CS rules.  Each thread is taking longer and longer, as the program encounters threads with higher and higher post counts, but its doing its thing, and by tomorrow, I expect the server to be back up to speed. 

I got to experience a bit of the speed earlier when I reset the web application and there was no one else on.  The server almost immediately began slowing down when I hit threads that had yet to be fixed, so I'm personally looking forward to seeing how people experience CS after the fix.  I want to expand the community again, get some new features added, and maybe get some good artists making use of the photo gallery.  Of course, it would be interesting if we had some more people blogging here too. 

Sigh... now time to finish off the admin for dndorks, then redo topwebcomics.com.