[bnystrom]

Well, unfortunately I've gotten some bad news. Our ISP is telling us they have no plans on updating the software or reconfiguring the new email server in order to fix the issues we now have with sending out email notifications from the Natara.com web site.

History: Most of the Natara (public) web site is written using HTML and a server side scripting language called "ColdFusion". At one time, prior to ASP and ASP.net. Before PHP became popular and Python was just a group of English comedians, ColdFustion (from Allaire) was one of the more powerful server side scripting engines. Natara started out using CF due to the fact that we were contracted by a local architectural firm to write a web based facilities management application which required ColdFusion. Since we gained a lot of experience with it from that project, we naturally went with ColdFusion for our own web site. Also, since we wanted a decent forum package, we choose this one, FuseTalk, which is also written in CF. We ended up "hosting" at what was soon named "Interland hosting".

Fast forward several years.... and ColdFusion was bought and sold a few times and has now ended being owned by Adobe (It went first from Allaire to Macromedia... then Macromedia got bought by Adobe). Due to the fact that ColdFusion is somewhat of an expensive package (especially compared with the more popular and free packages today) and the fact that it changed owners hands so many times and eventually got "buried" in Adobe where you hardly knew it even exists anymore, ColdFusion hosting companies became harder and harder to find. Those hosting companies that do exist seem to charge a premium to host on those servers since the software is more expensive and there is relatively little demand for CF anymore. But we (Natara) stuck with Interland since they kept at least one server around running an old copy of ColdFusion running and our contract with them somewhat "grandfathered" out pricing. BUT like I just mentioned, they only run an OLD version of ColdFusion. I think right now, from Adobe, you can get what amounts to version 9 or 10 of CF. The version of CF running here now is only version 4.5. But that was OK with us because we didn't require a lot of the new features and calls made available in newer releases.

Fast forward a little more... and now Interland becomes web.com. They hardly even know they HAVE a coldfusion server running. Backing up a little bit though, one thing that really bugged us here was the fact that they also hosted our email accounts (natara.com) on software that was about 7 years old. Well.. this is where our story hits some rough road. Web.com finally decided that they would upgrade the email servers and application for all their hosts. (Keep in mind that they mainly do OTHER server types besides Coldfusion... ColdFusion was not even on their minds when they made this decision). One of the things the new mail service requires is that the any software being used to "Send" email must use a username and password to authenticate (that means Outlook, etc... and even the scripting languages such as ColdFusion). The older mail server didn't require this as long as you logged into the receiving email server (POP) with a username and password first. That was the way most email SMTP clients worked many years ago... And that is how the SMTP scripting calls of the old ColdFusion language worked. With the requirement to log onto the sending email server, the OLD ColdFusion version that is hosted here no longer works. By upgrading the email servers they (Web.com) have essentially broken any way that a ColdFusion application has of sending out emails. IF Web.com were to upgrade the version of ColdFusion they have running on the server (which would cost them money I'm sure) then this problem could be resolved since newer versions of CF support accessing SMTP servers this way. (They could also change the requirements of sending emails, but that's a security thing and I wouldn't ever ask that of them). They have essentially told us that they really don't support ColdFusion any longer (like "you're lucky you are still here" type of statement).

So, there is nothing much we can do at this point with this particular web host. Our options pretty much are to move to a different hosting company. We've probably needed to do that for quite some time, but putting time into that takes time away from our real business of writing mobile/productivity applications.

For now and until we "move", there most likely isn't much chance of getting forum update notifications working. When we do move, we will most likely evaluate other forums software. I'm not sure about migrating the information here. We'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. And, we most likely will be converting to something other than ColdFusion.

That's where we are at now. No notifications from the forums (now broken for a totally different and "real" reason). Finding the time to put toward migrating elsewhere is what I'm considering at the moment. Just thought you would like to know.

[drmrbrewer]

I was wondering why I wasn't getting any notifications, so thanks for letting us know.

Mike