Yes, at long last we will be upgrading this wonderful site. 
I'm letting you know now because there will be some downtime this week during the upgrade.
We will be changing servers one day, then upgrading the software the next. So if all goes smoothly there will be two outages. Each should be several hours long. So don't freak if you can't get into the site for awhile. Just check back like once an hour.
The upgrade is going to be full of new features for everyone to enjoy. These include social networking features like Groups which you can join which will have their own threads and moderation and gallery.
Your user profile page will be much more interesting and interactive than it is now.
Of course we are going to be losing some things, and I've pointed out the main ones in the "Gallery & Guestbook" thread in this forum. In addition, some existing features will take time to reintegrate into the updated site.
There's going to be a new homepage and a journal feature where you can have your own page to post your grow journal(s).
Already you may have noticed the increased performance. This is due to tweaking our existing setup for maximum speed. Once icmag is on a new server you will see another huge speed increase. Then the new version of vBulletin once installed will again increase the speed. So things should only improve.
We're going to keep performance in mind when we do the settings for image posting. It would be nice if we could allow larger images than we do presently, as everyone is upgrading their monitors and can view larger images. So to accomodate that we're going to try to limit the actual images that show up in a thread. We'll probably have everything show up in thumbnails, and enlarge to full size upon clicking. You'll see what I mean.
That will make pages much faster to load and keep the server load and bandwidth down.
I'm very pleased to be able to come back here and help with this upgrade and I'll probably be sticking around to continue to improve the site from this point onwards.
I want to thank Gypsy and Dutchgrown for keeping this site together all these years. Likewise kudos to Green Lantern and Old Pink for administering the site! Good job!
So get ready for ICMag 2.0! You're gonna love it!
I'm letting you know now because there will be some downtime this week during the upgrade.
We will be changing servers one day, then upgrading the software the next. So if all goes smoothly there will be two outages. Each should be several hours long. So don't freak if you can't get into the site for awhile. Just check back like once an hour.
The upgrade is going to be full of new features for everyone to enjoy. These include social networking features like Groups which you can join which will have their own threads and moderation and gallery.
Your user profile page will be much more interesting and interactive than it is now.
Of course we are going to be losing some things, and I've pointed out the main ones in the "Gallery & Guestbook" thread in this forum. In addition, some existing features will take time to reintegrate into the updated site.
There's going to be a new homepage and a journal feature where you can have your own page to post your grow journal(s).
Already you may have noticed the increased performance. This is due to tweaking our existing setup for maximum speed. Once icmag is on a new server you will see another huge speed increase. Then the new version of vBulletin once installed will again increase the speed. So things should only improve.
We're going to keep performance in mind when we do the settings for image posting. It would be nice if we could allow larger images than we do presently, as everyone is upgrading their monitors and can view larger images. So to accomodate that we're going to try to limit the actual images that show up in a thread. We'll probably have everything show up in thumbnails, and enlarge to full size upon clicking. You'll see what I mean.
That will make pages much faster to load and keep the server load and bandwidth down.
I'm very pleased to be able to come back here and help with this upgrade and I'll probably be sticking around to continue to improve the site from this point onwards.
I want to thank Gypsy and Dutchgrown for keeping this site together all these years. Likewise kudos to Green Lantern and Old Pink for administering the site! Good job!
So get ready for ICMag 2.0! You're gonna love it!
