Site Updates

It's been quite a while since there was a major overhaul of the Cooler Crew Site. The time has come for one. The software we've been running on, Drupal 7, was originally planned to go end of life several years ago, before the Covid pandemic, in fact. Even before the pandemic struck, the maintainers had pushed that end of life date off into the future, but the pandemic hadthem continuing to push it forward. 

 Its immediate successor, Drupal 8, was first released on November 19, 2015. This upgrade represented a major architectural change to both the software and the upgrade process. Unlike the upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, which was comparatively simple, upgrading from 7 to 8 was, rather than being an in-place upgrade, going to be a migration. Content on the site would end up broken into smaller and smaller pieces for storage, and each piece of code was expected to perform its own migration. Given that the "important" content on this site is the supply of treasure hunt information, and I wrote a lot of code to enable all of the treasure hunt pieces, writing these migrations was not a trivial task, and so, as the end of life date kept getting pushed off, I also continued to push off the migration process.

In June of 2021, was the pandemic was winding down, the Drupal organization announced that Drupal 8 was being deprecated (it went EOL on November 2, 2021). Its own successor, Drupal 9, had been released on June 3, 2020, and it represented a potentially breaking change to how site configuration was managed. Drupal 9 reached the end of its life cycle on November 1, 2023, having been maintained alongside of Drupal 10 since its release on November 15, 2022. And oh yeah, the Drupal organization announced that the end of life to the software we've been using will be a non-negotiable, non-extendable January 5, 2025. 

So now, we had a jump from across 3 versions of the underlying software. Fortunately, I had started to write the migration code late in the Drupal 9 release cycle, so only minor changes were needed to move it to the current version of the Drupal. After a few test runs earlier on, and a couple more since the wind-down of the Winter 2024 treasure hunting season, I got to thinking that the only thing I had left was to make the site under Drupal 10 look as close as I could to the way it looked under Drupal 7. Fortunately making cosmetic changes to a web site is much simpler than making data structure changes, so after getting it "good enough" I decided to pull the trigger and make the changes. 

The result is what you see here. As I write this there are 3,826 pages on this site, that consist of treasure hunts, blog posts, newspaper articles, forums, and various other pieces of information. The underlying data has migrated over successfully. I took advantage of the migration process to make the hundreds of photo slide shows from various newspaper articles properly functional. But doing that means that there's a lot of content that I need to touch in order to make them fit the mold. 3,826, of them to be exact. 

I also made changes to how the various treasure hunts are organized, internally anyway. These changes made pages for the approximately 200 different treasure hunt types obsolete. Part of this process of touching each of those pages involves unpublishing them, so that I can repurpose the nodes (Drupal-speak for a piece of content) within the site for other uses. I don't like having gaps in the database for the node sequence numbers. This page, in fact, is taking the place of the page that formerly listed the Allison Wonderland Mock Hunt page. That part involves some database changes on my part, just to keep things clean. 

I'm about 626 pages into the whole process, out of 3,826. I've got a bit to go. But its going rather quickly. Until its done, there are certain things that may not work as well as I'd like. The menu items may not work. Treasure Hunt lists may not populate, but if there's something you're specifically looking for, you can always hit the search button in the top right corner of the site to look for it. As the guy who brings in most of the content in the site, I have to say I rather enjoy the tools that are behind the scenes for editing pages. And going forward moving to a new version of Drupal should be a lot easier for me. Hopefully you won't even notice it. 

Hopefully I'll be done touching everything that needs to be touched before the Summer hunting season kicks off. I've got a few that I want to find this year, and all I want to do here is copy clues into the respective pages. 

Because now that Drupal 10 has been released and available for 15 or so months, I'm going to have to get ready for Drupal 11's planned release in early December.

I'll let you know with another post when I'm done messing with the content. It will be soon. Until then, I probably know about things that may be problematic for you, so there's no need right now anyway to let me know if you see a problem.

And always remember:

Coolerheads will prevail!

The Water Cooler has been operational here for a couple of months now, so I thought I'd give a quick update on it.

As of right now, a few changes have been made based on feedback of the folks who have used it. The big one that's still out there is the inability to delete comments. At this point, there's a tradeoff between how we want the forum to look versus deleting comments. If we want to maintain the look linearly, I have to lock down the ability to delete comments, because deleting a comment right now results in all of the replies also get deleted, which would majorly screw up comments in a linear fashion.

That all said, I'm working on migrating the forum posts from the forum archive section of the database into the main site management system. This consists of several steps:

First, the archive contained posts from nearly 6000 unique user id's. Some of these were simple where a poster had an account at all three of the archive sites. They were easy to consolidate. The same was true of users, particularly at ableminds and PF who had survived through database compactions and rework so that, at one point they had one id in the database, and at a later point they had another. What was more interesting was consolidating folks whose user names had changed over time as they forgot passwords and created new accounts. Sometimes it was obvious, sometimes it took looking at taglines. Finally all of these users had to be imported into the account database here. By the time I got to this point, we were down to some 3800 unique posters. Over half of those posters had made only one or two posts. The vast majority of those users got condolidated into a "No user information available" user, although a few, who we know to have come back to the group, made the cut.

As a result of this step, you may find that you have an account at this site that you can't access. If you do, hit me up via the contact form below and I'll adjust things to give you access. If you need an account, do the same thing.

Step two is to actually consolidate the posts into comments on the site here. Since its our "bread and butter", so to speak, I'm starting with the archive of the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt threads. The 1998-2002 threads were quite easy. The PF Archive is taking a bit more work. Since the forum was a free-for-all, we had public and private threads, which I decided to consolidate into a single thread for archive purposes. As a result, what looked like a Joe originally may not look like it now. I'll work my way back through the other hunt threads, and then the more heated or more fun discussions. Its an iterative process, since I want to clean up the links within the various posts to previous posts (easy) and posts in other threads which is not so easy since it will require two passes through to link up posts with their new comment ID's. Once I get through one thread it should be a matter of figuring out which threads to consolidate and creating an individual forum topic.

We don't have an archive of file attachments from Ableminds, and because of the database loss there we probably never will, but we do have four years worth of them from PF, which I do intend to incorporate here after the discussions are imported.

With all the technical details aside, let me just say that I think we're finally home. Yes, we've said that before, but the forum here is within the site. As long as its up, the forum is up. For the moment, the only way to access the threads that have been imported will be to have an account and be logged in, but that's how you can see the clues for in-progress medallion hunts too, so its a bonus.

Have a look around, kick your feet up and stay a while. I know I am.

If you're still active on Ableminds, you know that for the past few weeks it hasn't been well. The latest update we have from them, as of Saturday is as follows:

The Ableminds Forum database is corrupt and we have been unable to find a way to recover it. We consulted a few other experts and there were a couple of suggestions offered, but unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to recover most of the information that was in the database.

We have a copy of the user database we created when we recently had the last crisis. It's not 100% up to date, but it provides a starting point to restore some user information. We will have to go through our paypal records and checks that were sent in to sort out any changes since then. The plan is to create a new empty database so folks can get back to posting again. Initially it will be free of charge for a period of time. We will offer refunds to anyone who asks. We will add in time for the payments we identify for those who stick around so that paid users will have posting privileges for the free period plus their paid period.

Unfortunately we have also lost information that was in the database regarding forums and privileges for co-hosts etc. All of that is gone so it will need to be recreated for those who want to keep on with the forum. There is some information in scripts that were not lost so some of the functionality of the site itself is preserved.

We researched options for a new server environment and we will be running on a new server soon that should avoid future problems.

What happened? Basically there was some issue on the old server that we don't fully understand, but it was filling up the disk on the server and corrupted the database. We had a backup at that time and were able to free up space at the time the first outage was reported, and so we started web crossing again, but within a few hours before a backup completed, the issue occurred again corrupting the only database we had on the server that wasn't corrupt. With a new server, we will be taking greater precautions to have as many backups as possible which will be possible with the larger disk drivers that newer servers now have.

First of all, rest assured that the Cooler Crew site is safe from this sort of problem. The "disc" that the database is on is less than one third full. If it ever filled more than that, I have plenty of disc space available to expand the data into. I have mechanisms in place to keep tabs on the available and used disc space so that I can take action if it gets too bad. I put "disc" in quotes above, because the site doesn't run on its own server. It runs as a virtual machine on top of redundant physical discs. If I ever had a problem I could pull a bad disc out and replace it, and no one would ever be the wiser (except me). 

From what it sounds like in this report, *all* of the backups that Ableminds had of their databases were on the same disc in the server as the main one, so that when discs filled up it was game over. I could be wrong. The Cooler Crew database and files are backed up nightly to a different server with completely different storage. If the discs the site were on should fail completely, we'd be able to "quickly" reimport the database on a new virtual machine and be up and running relatively quickly. I say relatively because it does take time to get a new virtual machine installed and configured.

As far as I know, the only backup that Ableminds has is what's available here in our archive. Fortunately, I ran my archive script relatively recently. Unfortunately "recently" means "before the 2018" Pioneer Press Hunt. As a result, the 350 or so posts that were made in the 2018 hunt thread are lost forever.

Several of you know that I've been toying around with the idea of a forum within the site for quite some time. I've been hesitant to go forward with it because I wanted to get things in place to nail the style that we had with the WebCrossing software at Ableminds, which if you've ever looked at other forum software doesn't quite match what's out there. When Ableminds first went down, I started putting a few modules together in the playground environment that I have set up. With the last update that Ableminds posted, I decided to make them live on the real Cooler Crew site, even if things weren't perfect.

And so, with that, I encourage you to check out the newly-reborn Water Cooler. It isn't perfect and there is still plenty of room for improvement, but it is there. In order to maintain some of the features of Ableminds, general users are restricted from creating new topics (what were discussions at Ableminds) or folders. If you want something, feel free to ask; there's a forum discussion thread just for that purpose. If there are features you want to see added, suggest it. This is something I won't take any criticism, good, or bad, as an affront to me. I cobbled together a bunch of stuff other people had done within the framework to get this together, so I'll blame them for any shortcomings.

One thing many of us have wanted at Ableminds was the ability to "like" a post, like you can on Facebook. Guess what? You got it here.

So how do you get into the Water Cooler? First you have to have an account set up on the site. Apart from me, 90 or so of you already do. I think all of them are related to old screen names. You may have forgotten your screen name or password. If you did, that's fine. Hit me up with a message on Facebook or through the contact link at the bottom of the page and I'll get you set up. If you don't have an account here and want one, contact me in one of those same ways and I'll set you up with an account. Gotta do this to keep spammers from posting on the site until there's a more reliable way to control access.

And please, once you're in, if you have problems, or a suggestion, or whatever, use the forum discussion board to say something!!

Happy hunting (and happy posting)!

You dig?

Every year, I try to make at least one improvement behind the scenes to the Cooler Crew site. Over this past year, we've added in as many of the small-town treasure hunts as we could get our hands on into the site. This has involved a lot of googling and other tracking down of articles from smaller newspapers, contact with the folks who run the various hunts, etc. As of right now, we have 633 distinct pieces of content on the site, dating back to some of the original writings of Greg Sax back in 1999, and including all of the hunts we know of that took place in 2013. I hope to keep that particular tradition up. I'm also in the process of trying to make the url names of each of the individual pages more consistent, something along the lines of content_type/source/year/name. 

On the back end of things, I'm tweaking the code that powers the treasure hunt section of the site. One of the more prominent things you'll notice is the addition of a Google Map to the hunt information section of the treasure hunt pages where we have GPS coordinates for the location of that particular treasure hunt. On that same note, I'm working to change the way the summary maps work on the site. As of right now, the summary map pages, e.g., the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt map are relatively static. Yes, they update based on hunts being added, but the underlying database structure isn't very conducive to maintenance, and all of the boundary data for cities, and hunt location data are sent to you, regardless of whether they're visible in the map you're looking at or not. I'm working to change that.

Finally, I'm actually working on a replacement for our forum. I think its kind of obvious that with Facebook, there are a lot of people who can't justify the $10 per year to maintain their membership at Able Minds. The last post in the Cooler Crew boards at the time I write this took place on September 25, nearly three months ago. A while ago, I started a conversation with many of you on Facebook just as a brainstorming place. I got a lot of good ideas from that. While I can guarantee that there won't be a forum hosted on coolercrew.com for the 2014 hunt, I'd really like to have something in place for the 2015 hunt. Don't be surprised if you see invites from me to test out a development site sometime over the summer. As for the history at Able Minds, well, you know we've got our boards from 1998-2005 archived here. I'm working to get the Ableminds content archived here too (as well as to keep it updated as people post). 

Oh and don't forget, with an account, you can create content here too. At the moment that's the only reason you need an account. As a result, accounts can now only be administratively created. When the forum comes online, you'll need an account for that as well. Until then, if you don't have an account, and would like one, follow the contact us link below and we'll set you up. We've done a major purge of "inactive" accounts, so if you had one before, or even thought you had one before, you might not now. Once the forum is back online, account creation will be re-enabled.

We are pleased to unveil to the general populace the new and improved Cooler Crew web site. There are some exciting new changes going on around these parts and we're glad you're a part of it.

The first thing you'll notice is the new look. After a decade of static web pages and a pseudo-content management system ares put together over the last few years, the site has implemented Drupal for managing the content. After spending a bit of time trying to work out a theme for it, the testers who provided feedback agreed that the "default" theme looks cool, so we're sticking with it.

One of the benefits of Drupal is that Coolerheads near and far will be able to submit their own news items to appear in the site. The Cooler Crew site has always depended on you to create the content you see here, and with the new software, that task is easier than ever to accomplish. Coming down the pipe, we're expecting to have an online photo gallery for you to submit your treasure hunt pictures to, as well as the ability to create your own blogs.

As always, the content of the site will be freely available. However, in order to create content, you'll have to sign up for an account on the site, but that's free and painless. And for those of you who have contributed material in the past, once you get signed up, we can attribute to you all that should be attributed to you, beyond just having a by-line in the story. Until then, well, let's just say we bring back an old name to be the nom-de-plume of everything not otherwise claimed, one Mr. Joe Medallion.

The Cooler Crew Forum at AbleMinds it is. Kitch allowed his WowBB site to expire, and I've disabled the phpbb site I had here, although the database and all its contents still exist. Who knows if and when it might be necessary again.

Update: 13 June 2005

A forum has been established at PeoplesForum's hosting provider, AbleMinds. This will likely end up being the permanent discussion home of the Cooler Crew

Updated 7 June 2005

According to the notice at http://pf.ableminds.com/, pf is likely going to be down all day. Check out one of the sites linked to below for alternatives.

3 June 2005

Given that peoplesforum.com is on its last legs (for those that don't know, the hosting provider of the site is planning on shutting it down come the end of June), updates will be placed here throughout the month as to where the discussion board will be moved to, and what software will be used for the site. If anyone has any suggestions for discussion board software or hosting sites, by all means, let me know, especially if the discussion board does end up here. Personally, I'm partial to the phpbb software. Kitch has suggested the WowBB software.

Rest assured that I've gone about archiving everything that we had at peoplesforum, and am planning on dumping it all into a database for future reference. (quite possibly, the old archives will be split up on a post by post basis and dumped into this same database). Until that time, THX has gathered everything from shoot the breeze and the medallion hunt threads in their HTML glory that can be used for archival purposes.

If, for some reason peoplesforum goes down unexpectedly, check either on the Cooler Crew web site or at the interim discussion board at http://coolercrew.mywowbb.com/ or at http://www.coolercrew.com/forum/.

Thanks to everyone that is helping with the article archive project. We've accomplished a lot, but there's plenty more to do! A mailing address is the only thing needed to get on the archival bandwagon. Cooler Crew is always looking for folks to help bring our vast library of past medallion lore into the modern era. Basically, we need some good keyboard hands. If you're interested in doing something to help create a wonderful piece of Minnesota history, this is where we need you the most. Please inquire with Greg Sax.