For those of you who may not know, I own and operate other sites outside of B2O one of which is Lifesupporters.com. Lifesupporters is a Peer Support Community that tackles sensitive social content such as abuse, separation/divorce, family matters, marriage/dating, health/wellness, etc.
The site has been online roughly 13 years.
Lifesupporters was hacked years ago and so much damage was done it took me until just recently to find the time to partially restore the Blog. I was forced to use a different software suite for the Blog which means all articles (and there are a lot of them) have to be recovered from a database backup, updated and then re-published on the new Blog.
As if this weren't bad enough, a critical SEO component for the Community stopped functioning just under 2 weeks ago. Why this is such a problem is all of my SERP placements are currently being de-listed with all existing traffic finding the main site only as none of the indexed url's resolve properly.
It would normally be a simple matter of just re-installing everything but there are two major road-blocks that make this impossible:
This is the only hope I have of recovering at least a portion of the daily traffic lost. Prior to 2 weeks ago Lifesupporters fell from over 150 concurrent visitors every hour of the day to around 20.
In other words, it's a catastrophe.
What's worse is being this was the first Website I ever created, I had little to no idea what I was doing originally and like most newbies installed a fair amount of 3rd party mods to the Forum. It made the site feature rich but the downside was it slowed performance drastically and created all kinds of additional database dependencies that have completely screwed everything up.
See addons do not work between major version changes and only serve to break the site. The database dependencies they create can be a living nightmare to deal with when trying to upgrade and this has been the case until yesterday.
For whatever reason (I'm still not entirely sure why?), I managed to get the site up to date and fully functional. It took about a dozen tries to get to this point and now I find myself with a working site that I need to jump on.
If possible I want to have this site be the main, live site this week hence my absence.
My apologies but this is my highest priority right now so everything else is a very distant second right now.
I don't anticipate this taking longer than July 31 however I will advise if things change.
This means this week there will be no iRacing for me and no SOMA Saturday.
Again my apologies but this is exceptionally important.
The site has been online roughly 13 years.
Lifesupporters was hacked years ago and so much damage was done it took me until just recently to find the time to partially restore the Blog. I was forced to use a different software suite for the Blog which means all articles (and there are a lot of them) have to be recovered from a database backup, updated and then re-published on the new Blog.
As if this weren't bad enough, a critical SEO component for the Community stopped functioning just under 2 weeks ago. Why this is such a problem is all of my SERP placements are currently being de-listed with all existing traffic finding the main site only as none of the indexed url's resolve properly.
It would normally be a simple matter of just re-installing everything but there are two major road-blocks that make this impossible:
- The company that made the SEO Software I paid good money for (vBSEO) went out of business years ago
- The existing forum is on a very old version of vBulletin that has not been supported for over 5 years now.
This is the only hope I have of recovering at least a portion of the daily traffic lost. Prior to 2 weeks ago Lifesupporters fell from over 150 concurrent visitors every hour of the day to around 20.
In other words, it's a catastrophe.
What's worse is being this was the first Website I ever created, I had little to no idea what I was doing originally and like most newbies installed a fair amount of 3rd party mods to the Forum. It made the site feature rich but the downside was it slowed performance drastically and created all kinds of additional database dependencies that have completely screwed everything up.
See addons do not work between major version changes and only serve to break the site. The database dependencies they create can be a living nightmare to deal with when trying to upgrade and this has been the case until yesterday.
For whatever reason (I'm still not entirely sure why?), I managed to get the site up to date and fully functional. It took about a dozen tries to get to this point and now I find myself with a working site that I need to jump on.
If possible I want to have this site be the main, live site this week hence my absence.
My apologies but this is my highest priority right now so everything else is a very distant second right now.
I don't anticipate this taking longer than July 31 however I will advise if things change.
This means this week there will be no iRacing for me and no SOMA Saturday.
Again my apologies but this is exceptionally important.
