Somersoft Forums

I've upgraded the forum software that runs the Somersoft forums - it now runs the same software we run here (although not as heavily modified as this site!).

The main reason for the upgrade was for security reasons - the old forum software had some known vulnerabilities and was an easy target for hackers. I felt it was better to spend the time upgrading it to more modern software which is easier to maintain and upgrade when security fixed become available.

Further to the security side of things, all member logins have been disabled and the hashed passwords that were previously stored in the database to allow people to log in, have all been removed. So even if the site was hacked, there is now no valuable information in the database beyond email addresses.

The added benefit of upgrading the site is that even though you can't log in or add new posts, the site becomes more usable as a resource - the search engine works better, it is now mobile-friendly and performance should have improved as well.

URL redirects have been put in place so all old links should work. If you do happen to come across a link from a search engine or from an 3rd party website which doesn't work (or just redirects to the forum home page), please let me know the original URL of the link and I'll investigate.

If you have any difficulty using the Somersoft forums or questions about the content there, please email support AT somersoft.com or use the contact form on that site.

I should note that Ian Somers has also been busy - he built a shiny new website for their business - somersoft.com.au - where you can buy PIA software and some of Jan's books.

 

About a week on-and-off of preparation, and then about 5 days straight of close to 18 hour days to get it fully operational.

A lot of the foundation work had already been done in the lead up to the launch of PropertyChat and work I've done in the 9 months since. I was able to reuse a lot of the work I did for this site on Somersoft, which made it much faster than if I was doing the Somersoft upgrade this time last year. Back then, I would estimate closer to 6 weeks full time work to get the Somersoft upgrade done with all the extra development work required.

 

Yes, Somersoft was hosted on the same server that PropertyChat was on - so the same outage took Somersoft offline.

PropertyChat has moved to a new server and I'm in the process of moving the other sites (including Somersoft) to new servers as well.

 

FYI - Somersoft is back online

 

More than read PropertyChat

While monthly pageviews on Somersoft is only about 10% of what it was before we archived it (and about 10% of what we get on PropertyChat), the number of monthly unique visitors has actually been growing.

By December 2015 it had dropped by more than 50% from its peak in May 2015, but since then has steadily grown again and has almost doubled from its low during this year and is now only about 10% lower than its peak! What's more, the number of monthly unique visitors to Somersoft is now about 25% higher than what we get on PropertyChat.

That's mostly because Somersoft has a much higher authority still, according to Google - that site/domain has been around since 2002 and has a lot of inbound links, which we're still building and will take time to grow on PropertyChat.