Hello everybody,

As some of you may have noticed, TI-Bank became unavailable ("403 Error") a few days ago, on August 19th, 2011. This occurred because our host, "Free.fr" suddenly closed the website, and said that it was officially because of the presence of local files being used as databases.
In fact, the main reason was probably the already-high and growing popularity of TI-Bank : we had up to 110,000 visits per month, lastly.
We contacted Free.fr, and they rightly asked as a prerequisite to the reopening, the removal of several thousand files, and disabling the statistics module (attendance, history ...) which are an essential feature of community websites.

The main actors of the site, which are Critor, Levak and myself, and in addition to Lionel Debroux, had meetings in emergency, and we have worked very hard (and even day and night for some of us ...) to recover backup files and databases of TI-Bank, finding, getting, configuring the host, buying domain names, restore files and databases, completely remake the whole "portal" of TI-Bank, which was based on an old and completely obsolete CMS with many vulnerabilities, and its full integration with the PhpBB3 forum, customized by ourselves.
(Moreover, the personal investment is not : the cost of domain names + hosting is already more than $350 per year.)

So... We are pleased to announce our new website : TI-Planet.

TIPlanet (or TI-Planet) [Edit: ] is *now* available on http://www.ti-planet.org or http://www.tiplanet.org.

Here are the changes and benefits of TI-Planet:

- The speed and overall processing power of the many users connections will normally be higher
- The overall design has been completely remade
- The forum and the portal (including modules) were merged
- A single and universal login (based on the forum) was set up.
- Existing members of TI-Bank still have their accounts working on TI-Planet !
- The News are now fully integrated into the forum, and members with the rank of "writer" (ask on the forum to become one) can post articles to the portal
- Archive Management (file downloads) has been improved
- Etc. etc ...

We wish all former members, visitors and regulars users of TI-Bank, a pleasant moment of discovery of the new French reference website about TI calculators, and we thank you all for now updating your links to either www.tiplanet.org or www.ti-planet.org.


Thank you very much, and looking forward to seeing you soon on TI-Planet,

The TI-Planet administrators
Adriweb, Critor, Levak, Lionel Debroux

Welcome (back) to the community; this sounds like a great idea! I'm sorry to hear that your host pulled the rug out from under you; does that mean you were operating on free hosting up until now? Too bad you didn't chat with me; I would have recommended Surpass Hosting as being inexpensive and having excellent support. Out of curiosity, why did you decide not to keep the TI-Bank name?

Yup.


Indeed, I know that they have excellent support; however, reliability is mild at times (well, we can't blame them because they're inexpensive ) and performance is, in my experience at least, lackluster.
When I'm posting on Cemetech, usually, it takes more than 5 seconds, and up to several dozens of seconds, for the post to be taken into account after I click Submit.
[EDIT: sure enough, this time, the post appeared in "only" 2-3s ]

Oh nice guys! You'll post here to let us know when it is functional? I'll add your link up on TI-Freakware once your site is functional

It would find itself among all these

http://tifreakware.net/admin/link.php?catag=1

Sure, we'll keep people informed when it goes live

Lionel: I blame the size of our post database and MySQL for that, personally. Although yes, shared hosting is also partially to blame, and one day I'll have to bite the bullet on VPS or dedicated, especially considering all the other services I run. Definitely continue to tell us about developments on TI-Planet!

Just because you still have to wait...

Nice, that looks very attractive. Regarding your little "SAX" there, may you perhaps want to be linked into the actual tiSAX network?

http://www.tiplanet.org is now open !

Kerm: we'll look into it

Actually I think since it is a french channel it would be better to keep separate until sax supports multiple channels.

I believe the last time we discussed it, we decided that it wasn't a good idea to support multiple channels, as it would muddy the waters too much, and might be too confusing for users, especially newbies. However, as we've done in a few other cases, we could only forward things like post and let them use a local version of SAX for chatting.

Edit: So to keep this even more on topic, how's the site launch going so far?

It's going pretty well.

It hasn't been completely indexed by search engines yet, but we already have somme good stats.

However, The server may appear a bit slow sometimes, and we're trying to find a solution about that (move some static files somewhere else)

Good luck, I hope the slowness clears up. I should add you guys to the Links section; I'm not sure that I had ever added TI-Bank there for some reason.