Salamz the beautiful peeps of GS,
First of all I want to apologize everyone who might have tried accessing GS earlier and couldnt reach the home page. Please allow me to explain.
All of you know by now that if we ever have to perform maintenance activities we post a notice ahead of time and get the due diligence done in the given timeframe. What happened one week back was initially a completely unexpected outage that lead to a temporarily plugout situation where we kept GS down to fix things.
Unfortunately there were a couple of security breach attempts at one of our servers hosting GS. The effort of intrusion was possibly coming from some external source. But we quickly took care of it. It didnt take anytime to notice that someone was trying to heck in, we immediately brought the services down in order to leave no possible access for intruders.
Rest assured, no harm is done. Alhamdolillah. And nothing will go wrong in future either, iA.
As you know that the world is in a very tense political situation and GS being one of the oldest, most organized and reliable community for Pakistani origins or even the other peaceful fellas of rest of the subcontinent, its not a surprise that we could be a target from our not-so friendly neighbor(s). Ahm, Ahm. But it really doesnt matter since we promptly took care of it. Haterz gona hate.
However that did give us an opportunity to consider and assess what we have now, where is the future lying and how do we reach there. Alhamdolillah GS is still the home of so many loving people who visit here and contribute to the best of their ability. Other forums only dream to get this kind of sincerity. I am so proud of you all.
That being said, I know some of you have been asking the features we had earlier or some of the new ones. Bringing chat back, removing blogs glitches, easy accessibility from cell phone.. just to name the few.
However houston we may have a problem. Technically speaking, currently GS is hosted at a vbulletin framework site. It has a lot of limitations. So how can we incorporate advanced features here? Apparently the solution lies in the possible migration of our hosting platform to any of the latest forum hosting sites where we can avail all these features easily.
Every other thing stays the same. In Azkar's words it will be a move from a old fashioned Haveli to an apartment in a modern high-scale furnished building. I'm sure some of us can relate to this example
To make it simple, we have found a new home. We’ve setup a beta site already and the testing is kicked off. So far the results are very impressive. I’m sure everyone of us will like it. No boasting at this time but you’ll see as we make progress ahead.
Once again, nothing else is going to change. GS is not going anywhere. The new features in our future home will only make it shine more.
These are the things in cooking. I invite all of the GS family to chime in. Suggest things that you want to see after migration. Share technical detail that you are aware of so we all can work on it. Please post it here, PM me directly or whichever the way you like.
All concerns, questions, suggestions welcomed. The future of GS is bright iA!
I really want to thank all of you for the remarkable patience, sincerity and continuous support. Plenty of love!
-Sid
