Moving bbcbasic.co.uk to a new host

[Hated Moron]

I'm currently working through the steps required in order to move bbcbasic.co.uk to a new hosting provider, one which does not impose a bandwidth limit (other than 'fair use') and has a bigger disk storage allocation.

This is obviously a potentially hazardous process, because I've used the same hosting provider ever since bbcbasic.co.uk was first registered and if I muck something up there's a possibility that some content will become inaccessible, or some functionality will be irretrievably lost.

In an attempt to reduce the likelihood of this happening I have created a clone of the site, hosted by the new provider, at bbcbasic.uk (note the absence of the .co). I would greatly appreciate it if you would check the functionality of this site from your end.

Here are some pages that you might like to try. Beware of following any absolute links from these pages, because they will of course take you to the current site rather than the clone site and be of no use at all! Check for bbcbasic.uk in any such link.

BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 main page
BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 manual
BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 web edition
Forces of Darkness web edition
Wiki
Forum
Products page

[JeremyNicoll]

It's hard to be sure if the cloned forum site works. When I went to https://bbcbasic.uk/forum/
I was first shown a message "The future of this forum..." on a page whose browser URL did say
"https://bbcbasic.uk/forum/".

But as soon as I clicked on "Dismiss" the next screen showed the old forum's index page

https: //www.bbcbasic.net/forum/ index.php

(EDIT: which I have just typed spaced-out because if I didn't it got replaced by a partial URL when
I first submitted this post)

It'd be easy not to notice the change!

On the plus side (but also confusing, maybe), clicking either "reply" or "new topic" is working
here for me, which - if "here" is the place that previously wasn't working for me - is progress,
maybe (if anyone knows why it suddenly works).

[Hated Moron]

When I went to https://bbcbasic.uk/forum/
I was first shown a message "The future of this forum..." on a page whose browser URL did say
"https://bbcbasic.uk/forum/".

How do you normally access the forum then? That's exactly what the landing page is supposed to look like! Compare these two links:

bbcbasic.co.uk/forum
bbcbasic.uk/forum

If there's a difference that's what I need to know. If they look the same, all is well!

[JeremyNicoll]

Seeing the message about the future of the forum is not the point I was making.

The point is that after dismissing it I was(?) taken back to the old forum location, not kept in the cloned forum.
That is, the browser URL bar no longer showed the cloned location, but the old one.

[Hated Moron]

The point is that after dismissing it I was(?) taken back to the old forum location, not kept in the cloned forum.

This is what I said in my original post: "Beware of following any absolute links from these pages". That's exactly what you did when you clicked the Dismiss button, so it's not in the slightest bit surprising (nor significant) that it took you to the same place!

There isn't a "cloned forum" (assuming that you mean one which doesn't involve an absolute link to an external site) and hasn't been since I moved the forum to a new host a week or so ago. The post in which I announced the move of the forum is here.

The 'current' website is at bbcbasic.co.uk, the new 'clone' website, which I'm keen should be tested as thoroughly as possible, is at bbcbasic.uk and the forum is at bbcbasic.net. They use three different hosting providers.

[Hated Moron]

progress, maybe (if anyone knows why it suddenly works).

My guess is that it's just elapsed time. Perhaps something was cached in your system which wasn't refreshed until now. I know that DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate, and your local DNS cache - or the one in your router - may need explicit flushing (I have to remember to do 'ipconfig /flushdns' in Windows).

[JeremyNicoll]

The point is that after dismissing it I was(?) taken back to the old forum location, not kept in the cloned forum.

This is what I said in my original post: "Beware of following any absolute links from these pages". That's exactly what you did when you clicked the Dismiss button, so it's not in the slightest bit surprising (nor significant) that it took you to the same place!

I did wonder about that. But I wouldn't have expected the underlying code that presents & then responds to dismissal of a message pane at a forum / site to have somewhere within it the hard-coded URL of the next page to display; I'd have expected it to be a relative URL.

Looking again at the pane with the "Dismiss" button - I see though that it's NOT a button; it's a link, to an absolute URL rather than a relative one.

There isn't a "cloned forum" ...

But you did say you'd cloned the older site AND ask people to check if the new/cloned pages worked, and this forum page was one of them.

It was not clear to me (& maybe other people) that - if I now understand you correctly - the page one sees at "bbcbasic.uk/forum" - the "landing page" you call it - is NOT being served from the server where the forum itself is, and is certainly not being generated by the forum's PHP software, unlike every other page in the forum. I see now that in fact it's a screenshot of the forum home page as it must have been ages ago - that would explain something else - why it only shows three subforums not the much larger number that the "real" forum has, & a smaller number of total posts etc. And it makes the use of the "Dismiss" button as a link to the actual forum a lot more understandable.

[Flatlander]

Btw, this page always loads at the wrong size on iPad. Not a problem, but I didn’t know if you were aware.

2024-01-06 23-32-56.jpeg

[Hated Moron]

But I wouldn't have expected the underlying code that presents & then responds to dismissal of a message pane at a forum / site to have somewhere within it the hard-coded URL of the next page to display; I'd have expected it to be a relative URL.

Why do you think the forum 'landing page' was added in the first place (there never used to be one in the olden days)? It was precisely so I could move the forum to a different host without anybody being aware that it had moved!

I needed a way to be able to redirect bbcbasic.co.uk/forum to a destination of my choosing (which might be on the same site or another site) and a landing page was the low-tech approach I adopted. It also had the virtue of allowing me to post an announcement should the forum itself fail or be due a planned shutdown.

The need for this stems partly from the anomalous situation whereby the forum's administrator (DDRM) has no access to the forum's host site and the host site's administrator (me) has no access to the forum's administration area! The landing page is the one part of the 'forum' over which I have any control.

None of this has any relevance to the issue at hand, which is how to move bbcbasic.co.uk to a new host safely. Let's leave it there, please.

[Hated Moron]

Btw, this page always loads at the wrong size on iPad. Not a problem, but I didn’t know if you were aware.

None of the website is 'mobile compatible', I get warnings from Google about that all the time. The trouble is I have no idea what that means or how it could be corrected, indeed since the entire website is written in nothing more recent than HTML4 (no CSS or Javascript or anything like that) it's probably impossible.

In any sensibly managed organisation the person who writes the application code wouldn't be the person who creates the web site, they are utterly different skills not likely to be shared by the same person. And neither of them would be the person who writes the manual! But because nobody has ever offered to help, despite my frequent pleas, I end up doing all those things, most of them very badly!

Sorry.