The SP-Studio community is offline for a couple of days. Some big changes are made, but it will come back of course! Here you can see what I am working on right now. This is for the members who don’t know how to spend their time without the community ;). Everybody who is bored by this can just ignore the long text.
I will keep you up-to-date here, on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

21.2.2012 | 19:00 h | New registrations and uploads are not possible right now; backups started.
21.2.2012 | 20:45 h | Gallery is offline now. Backups are finished. The next step is to install a message board.
21.2.2012 | 21:45 h | Nearly forgot the FTP backup of the gallery. 12220 files, 283 mb. Now downloading phpBB.
21.2.2012 | 22:00 h | phpBB installed, looking through the setting. Nice software :).
21.2.2012 | 23:30 h | phpBB: I created the categories and forums, changed settings and assigned permissions.
22.2.2012 | 00:15 h | Now it’s time to bridge the old Coppermine gallery and the new phpBB message board.
This is the most dangerous part. Unfortunately I read something about the user IDs being wrong after it’s done… but I hope it will work. Wish me luck. Otherwise you will need 2 accounts (gallery & forum) or I will have to change the ID of every user myself. This would be too time consuming.
22.2.2012 | 00:40 h | Argh. Worst case. I cannot bridge an existing gallery so easily. I will have to assign every single user ID in the database. So I will clean up the whole place now, deleting old and bad wish voting wishes. And after that I will have to delete every account without comments / picture uploads. Sorry, but you can register again later. Preparing will take some time, so the community might not be back before the weekend. But if I do this I want to do it right :). I want to make sure those members who have been active can keep their accounts.
22.2.2012 | 15:45 h | Work the whole day to prepare bridging. Thanks to my husband who helps me a lot! We have already deleted half of the nearly 10.000 registered gallery users (everybody with 0 uploads and 0 comments) and there are still many to delete. I cleaned up the wish voting area as well.
22.2.2012 | 16:50 h | Now it’s time for a SP-Studio break, because I need to get some others things done.
22.2.2012 | 20:30 h | Now I continue to clean up the Gallery. We are down to 2869 members already. So many unused accounts ;).
23.2.2012 | 10:30 h | Very frustrating night. Installing forum add-ons with autoMOD does not work. I could try it manually, but this will take way more time. But my biggest problem right now is the old gallery. Bridging its user accounts with the new forum will not work the way I hoped. After cleaning up there are still more than 1000 accounts left. I would have to assign every single one of them to a new user ID and change the folder names… this would take weeks. I am not sure how to hanlde it.
23.2.2012 | 14:00 h | No progress regarding the gallery accounts problem. But the design for the forum is nearly finished and I really like it! I found a very nice style and changed it a bit to make it fit the sp-studio.de design.
23.2.2012 | 18:50 h | Things are taking a different direction now. After hours of frustration because of the problems with bridging I found an amazing gallery software for phpBB. I am testing it right now and it’s so much better to use than the old gallery… for example contests can be held automatically, you can change the sort order for each album and you would be able to upload many pictures at the same time. I will let my new mods join the message board in a couple of hours so they can see it themselves. I might leave the old gallery as it is and move to this one. If this will happen I will make sure the contest and wish voting pictures will be moved to the new gallery, so nothing gets lost.
24.2.2012 | 12:00 h | The moderators were invited to the new message board to test it. I hope they will like the new gallery, because I would like to move to it ;). Everybody else will be able to enter the new SP-Studio community on Sunday (if everything works the way I hope).
25.2.2012 | 00:45 h | Everything’s fine. I am moving pictures from the old gallery to the new one, so the contests and wish voting suggestions don’t get lost. Those who had their own user gallery will be able to save their pictures as well. The comments and ratings will be lost, but I hope you are not angry about it. The old gallery will be online again as an archive so you can see the old pictures and comments. Now I continue to prepare the message board and new gallery for the relaunch. There are still many changes to make, but I hope I will be done on Sunday.
26.2.2012 | 22:00 h | It’s done! 🙂 Join the new community!