Chris Perkins

Also testing a dragged image.... Failed. Looking into it.

Excellent, thank you Martin.

So did I! I think that's because it's recalibrating, counting posts, indexing images etc etc in the background. Very pleased to see you both though! It means it seems to be working for others, too.

It was supposed to be a simple case of copying some files from here to there and then running an 'upgrade' script, but of course it became an 8 hour ordeal just to get things into a state where it would even allow me to run the upgrade script, with just blank failure shown on screen and mostly unhelpful messages if at all. Emails to and from my host and a support request with the Invision forum people, plus me baffooning around trying to change random settings that I read online had helped for a bloke called Keith in a similar but different situation and here we are! It's all upgraded so hopefully it now works flawlessly in every respect. What definitely no longer works in the rest of the predecimal.com site (from the root, i.e. without the /forum bit). That wasn't really doing much and the aim is to now move the forum over to the root so that predecimal.com is just the forum. I'll also change that old banner stuff at the top and maybe add some extra info about predecimal.com, but first, let's see how all this new software and stuff works.

The number of posts shouldn't affect anything. I think it's just very buggy and quite random. The php software version was deprecated 7 years ago, my host informs me, and that was ok at first and it chugged along fine, but so many years later and it's become more fragile and liable to break - that's my hope anyway! Yesterday I did a complete backup of the site (over 30gb data) and have prepared all the files and stuff I need to attempt an upgrade of the php version and the complete forum related files today. You may not be able to read this now, as the upgrade will take the site down for a while. It should show an unavailable message while that goes on. Fingers crossed, here we go.......

It's all a bit of a mystery, but at this stage it's best to upgrade and then see if that helps, or if not then investigate further.

Just also trying a random jpg.

Hello everyone. I'll see about getting the forum software and all the stuff it relies on upgraded to the newest versions at the weekend. There may well be some hiccups along the way, but in the end it'll be worth it I'm sure. Thanks for your patience.

Hello! Ooo, that looks bad doesn't it. Same happens for me from the main predecimal.com root (without /forum/ etc). Sorry for being slow with this. I was away in GB for some of the time. The forum software is quite old now and could do with an update. The problem is, it requires a newer version of something in the background (php), which isn't normally an issue, but I know that other stuff won't work with the newer version. I think the way forward is to turn predecimal.com into just a forum. I don't really buy/sell coins at all anymore as it became less practical since brexit and also I wanted to concentrate on on the books and app, as they are so much simpler to manage, which is what I've been doing for some time. It should be possible to separate the forum, have it work from the root predecimal.com/ and upgrade everything in the background so that it all functions properly again. There may be some issues along the way that will need to be ironed out, but I don't really see an alternative.

Hello, sorry for not responding sooner. I'll see what the latest from the host is and in fact direct him to read this thread so he can get an idea about the sorts of errors ocurring.

Hello, yes I had a report and have contacted the hosts. Apparently they had blocked a lot of IP addresses due to massive amounts of spam/malicious traffic. They may have been overzealous. I'm still investigating.

I checked myself just now and all looks normal to me. Was it a temporary glitch or does it still look wrong to you? Chris

My pleasure. I've also updated some other stuff in the background so if this message gets through, that's also a good sign! I may also completely update the forum software to the newest version. I'm always nervous about that as it tends to change things that make little sense and can negatively affect some users who use a particular feature etc. In some cases it can also introduce new errors, but the last update was 4 years ago so it's probably due one.

There was a little issue identified by my host where the master global config setting for the forum path was set to the non SSL version (i.e. http not https). That may have caused the forum to get mixed up trying to serve both http and https and that may well have caused problems. I suspect that may require users to clear their caches or just the files related to the forum - or it may well slowly sort itself out (if that was the issue).

I'll check with my host. As far as I knew, the security cert covers the whole website and I'm not aware of anything being changed a couple of weeks ago.

Hello everyone. As far as I know the forum should be https, just as the whole of the predecimal.com website is. TomGoodheart sent me a link to this page, but the link was actually just plain http and that seemed to work but did show 'not secure' in the browser. Can those experiencing a problems manually change what appears in the address path to be prefixed with https instead of http? Does that help at all?

There will be a Kindle version in the next few weeks (and of the new decimal book).

The variety is often called a 'leftie' as the milled section when you look under the hologram with the Queen' side facing you is usually to the right of the hologram. On lefties it's obviously on the left and there are actually some where the point is slightly milled (like a middly :S). It is certainly not a 50/50 thing like with the writing orientation on £2 coins and is no doubt due to the collar/dies not being fitted 'properly' although I think the RM have stated that there is no wrong or right way, so it's just an interesting variant. Here's my page which has more info: https://www.checkyourchange.co.uk/the-six-new-1-coin-varieties/ They seem fairly common for 2016 and less so for later years.

Firstly, condition is everything. Coins of most dates are very common in normal used condition and tend to be very low value. The best book to gauge condition is this one: https://www.coinpublications.com/product/the-standard-guide-to-grading-british-coins/ And a book for values is this one: https://www.coinpublications.com/product/collectors-coins-gb-2018-1760-1970/ (both also available on Amazon). It is a lot to take on at first!

Actually, that's a little bit of a security hole that I've just fixed! Guests were able to start topics within the technical support area and were allowed to reply to stuff elsewhere. Guests can no longer post anywhere and for the last couple of months I manually approve every new member. I did not approve Andeson because his email address looked odd and his IP is from Bangladesh, which is more well known for its spamming bots than it is for collectors of British coins!

Actually my new theory on the coppery coloured 20p's (they seem to occur a lot more for the 20p than any other current denomination) is improper annealing causing the atoms to migrate. First proposed in the USA by Mr Diamond, who really knows error coins. More info here: http://www.error-ref.com/improper-annealing/ These days the RM also charge £20 to look at coins, so no longer worth doing for minor things like this.

Oh look, it's all new and has all new bells and whistles. It was a bit fiddly but I got there in the end. Hope there are no issues now.

Note that some may experience bugs on the forum for the next day or so. I am trying to update and old version of the software to the latest version but only got as far as updating the server PHP version today, which may cause (and in fact already has caused) problems for some depending on browser and so many other factors these days. Sorry about that. It'll be worth it in the end!

Interesting stuff.

Where did that come from Zookeeperz? Peckris is sound as a pound and really does know his stuff.