TRP Service Suspended

As announced on our companion Google Site https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/ we reluctantly took the decision to temporarily suspend The Reeves Project wiki with effect from 13 December 2017. There were two updates during February.

Status Update - 02 Feb 2018

In the past two and a half weeks since the last update we've made some good progress but also suffered a couple of knock-backs.

Work with the upgraded copy of TRP has made good progress. A large number of issues (50+ and counting) caused by the upgrade have been identified. Many are little more than cosmetic, but a handful are pretty fundamental to the way TRP works. The good news is that we have already worked out how to fix or work around the vast majority of those issues.

Our efforts to bring TRP back to the internet have faired less well. The environment within a domain we'd previously used for testing has proved to be incompatible with the requirements of the version of TikiWiki we're now expecting to use. This has delayed our plans to seek your help for the next stage of testing by about a fortnight. We have identified our new preferred hosting provider and are awaiting their responses to a couple of technical queries prior to opening an account with them. We will then be ready to start to build a new test environment for TRP.

The Rootsweb email list Reeves-L was one of many communication channels Beverly has been using to keep you informed about our progress. We recently learnt that Ancestry, the custodians of the Rootsweb email lists, had suspended all of their email lists whilst they resolve some issues.
See "Update: January 25, 2018" at https://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/surname/r/reeves.html

Update: January 25, 2018

We have taken the RootsWeb Mail system offline for the next few weeks so that we can upgrade the Mailman system. Mailman is the software which runs the mailing lists. While the system is down, you will not be able to send or receive email. We thank you for your patience.

Originally posted at https://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/surname/r/reeves.html but no longer available from there. See http://home.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ retrieved 17March2018

To make good this gap in our communications channels, we've created a new Google Group, TheReevesProject123, which we will use to keep you advised by email of our progress to bring TRP back online. If you are already a community member of The Reeves Project, you should have received an invitation to join a new Google Group called TheReevesProject123. If you have yet to accept your invitation, please do it now. Google restricts the validity of those invitations to seven days, and the first batch were issued on 30Jan. We'll advised how non TRP members can join this group in a week or so via our Google Site (see below), if it works as well we expect.

Thank you for your continued patience and please continue to check to https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/ for the very latest news about our progress in restoring TRP.

Added by Admin Martin on Friday 02 February 2018 at 17h15GMT/12h15EST

Status Update - 22 Feb 2018

At last we are able to report that we've made some positive progress since the last update.

Our enquires of the preferred hosting provider mentioned in the previous update eventually revealed that the level of control we need over the environment in which TRP runs wasn't available with their budget priced hosting plans. When they indicated a plan costing over USD70 per month, we politely said "no thank you". We already had a second choice of hosting provider in mind and were able to very quickly establish a new web presence for TRP with them. This new version of TRP still needs a lot of technical work done before it will be ready for general usage.

To use a real world analogy, TRP is moving home. We've rented new accommodation in the city (hosting provider) we're moving to. But its three weeks until the school term finishes and we need to continue to pay the rent on our current home as well. And then there are the various utility companies to deal with. We've told the postal service when to start re-directing our letters but who knows how well that will work in the first few days. The phone is on at our new home, but when we call our friends they are confused because our new number appears on their handset, not the name they've stored against our old number. And our friends can't look up our new telephone number as the phone company has yet to update their public database.

I suspect most of us have been in this situation at some time in our lives. And its exactly where TRP is at the moment. But for TRP an even better analogy might be relocating to another region or country. Before we moved TRP "spoke" version 6.7 of the underlying TikiWiki software. In our new city, we have to speak version 15.5 to be understood.

To continue with the new home utilities example, yesterday (21 Feb 2018) the postal service made their first collection of mail from our new address and immediately started delivering those messages to you. We send all our mail with the name "adminatTheReevesProjectdotorg" but as yet the public indexes of who lives where haven't yet been updated to reflect TRP's new home. So when your e-mail provider looks up TRP in the directory (DNS), they find a mis-match between our new street address (IP address) and the registered address for TRP. This is one of the many things we're working to get fixed.

Now if you happen to have an alert (known as a watch) set on one of the pages we've already updated for TW15.5, the email notification you received may have been flagged as potential spam. It wasn't; we'll get our new home in order as quickly as we can. If you did receive one of those notifications yesterday, you'll now have sufficient information to log-on to the new TRP. Please don't, the house is still a mess and we're not yet ready for visitors. We'll announce a house warming party, when everybody is welcome, as soon as we can.
And before that house warming party, we'll need a few invited friends to come round and help out ... we'll post more about that in a few days at https://sites.google.com/site/thereevesproject123/

Added by Admin Martin on Thursday 22 February 2018 at 14h10GMT/09h10EST

Wiki Stats - End February 2018

Whilst TRP remained unavailable to TRP Community Members during the whole of February, the admins first fired up the "new" TRP on 20 February. They have been accessing that system for the past few days checking for issues.

The total number of pages in the Wiki (as at 1 March 2018) was 7179 (previously 7176, 7171, 7171) an increase of 3 pages during the month. The primary focus of the admins over the past few days has been to retrieving existing pages and looking for issue and not adding new meaningful content. Of the total, 1442 pages (was 1442, 1442 1438) begin with a number and are most probably a date related gleaning. We currently have 2942 wiki pages categorised as "People", of which 2518 begin with the letter "R". .
Community members should log in to see more.

TRP Users

We ended February 2018 with 305 user accounts registered in TRP, an increase of two. Both these were new admin accounts to help facilitate the current testing phase.