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Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:29 am
by thinkslogically
Honestly, I need more info. I'm certain that there's been discussions going on behind the scenes with mods and such, but aside from a couple of posts by M0rt (which are very appreciated incidentally), there has been no communication from anyone else about what's going on.

We had no real warning that the forum was about to go down two days ago (except for a "the forum might explode... See ya!" post), leaving no time for important posts to be grabbed by their creators; no-one has explained why it was necessary or what's been done (but we have lost our custom theme); and now we're being told "it's broken" (but not really what that means. Is it just tags, or is the forum likely to implode into non-functionality), that we can either live with it or burn it and roll back to "something", and by the way, we might lose everything (again) if that happens....

So I'm going to go with "not enough information". I appreciate the discussion though.

FWIW, the 2013 crash was a huge deal, but folk recovered from it in good faith that it was unlikely to happen again. If we're about to lose the forum, a heads-up in advance would be appreciated so we can start packing our boxes and saving what we can.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:46 am
by BadgeAddict
^I agree, which is why I'm "Ctrl+A"ing all of my old games in an attempt to copy them over into word and then PDFing them for safe keeping. It takes a long time, it sucks, but I won't lose them that way.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 6:37 am
by M0rtimer
Damn, time flies fast...

Also, keeping you guys somewhat in the loop: Duke is gonna try and see whether or not if it's possible to import our current forum into something that was "designed" to be able to handle it... Assuming that goes without problems, we will likely be switching to that. (But only if it works, and that's a big "if")

Anyways, let me try and answer some questions...

-The forum update needed to be done asap for security purposes- Bot prevention only a part of that.
-I'd try and find an example of what a "broken" post looks like, but I honestly can't even find any others than the ones I had already fixed. Just know that a broken post will appear to be empty, and there will be a couple of errors on top of the page- But simply editing the post in question has so far always proven to fix the issue. At this point, I very much doubt the forum will "implode" into non-functionality anymore.
-The rollback assuming the current issues persist would only be to two days ago when the update started. On that note, everything before that point is essentially untouchable- You don't need to worry about losing any of that. No matter what happens, the idea right now is to keep everything here available. Should that ever change, there will be plenty of warning about it. (Which is the reason why it all happened so fast in the first place- Nothing was supposed to be lost in the first place.)

There's no need for panic in general, at the very least. The forums are not gonna implode on themselves. The very worst case scenario is that we need to roll back two days and close the forum, but everything that's on here would still be left available in that instance.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 9:42 am
by Wolfie
I... kinda like the new background and theme.

Not sure how I feel about the blocks instead of neat rows for the topics, though.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 9:51 am
by Rooks
Holy crap. I just navigated from Page 1 to Page 2 of this thread and :bomb: ... whole new theme in place. Haha...

Anyway, my vote is always to just keep working through stuff. Upgrades have problems. Better to stay on the newer software that solves the main problem (bots) and deal with little upgrade problems than roll back and have to figure out a whole new strategy.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 9:53 am
by BadgeAddict
Woahhhhh!!

This (Theme) is so kick-asso

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 9:57 am
by SuperVaderMan
It's an improvement, but I'd prefer sheer black over the current imagery at the top of the page. At the very least I wouldn't want to see a melting Big Ears all the time.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 10:33 am
by Wolfie
Hey! Where'd it go? :(

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 10:41 am
by M0rtimer
It was briefly switched back, and then should have been set as the default... But it appears something might have gone wrong and it didn't for anyone that was online at the time?

Hey if anyone just logged on and sees this message- Could you let know if you see a boring white background, or an epic black one? Thanks. Anyways, for anyone with the boring background- If you go to your user control panel, under board preferences, you can switch it back.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 10:47 am
by Wolfie
M0rtimer wrote: Thu Apr 19, 2018 10:41 am It was briefly switched back, and then should have been set as the default... But it appears something might have gone wrong and it didn't for anyone that was online at the time?

Hey if anyone just logged on and sees this message- Could you let know if you see a boring white background, or an epic black one? Thanks. Anyways, for anyone with the boring background- If you go to your user control panel, under board preferences, you can switch it back.
BORING BORING BORING background. I'm heading up to switch right now. :lol:

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 11:15 am
by Glemp
I see boring background, switching now.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 11:18 am
by Wolfie
Quick note about something: At the bottom of the main page is the "Who is Online" section. If you clicked on it in the past incarnation of the forum, it would open up to a new page that showed where people were in the forum. Looking a topic in General Discussion, replying to PM, etc. Now it just minimizes the section.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 11:25 am
by BadgeAddict
The problem I have with the new theme is that it squishes the column instead of allowing it to be so wide.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 11:34 am
by Wolfie
BadgeAddict wrote: Thu Apr 19, 2018 11:25 am The problem I have with the new theme is that it squishes the column instead of allowing it to be so wide.

Some of us don't use full screen.. so I don't see the issue. :P :lol:

I did spot an issue when I quoted you though... The words in the info box for text editing are a light gold on silver. Hard to see.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 11:35 am
by BadgeAddict
I actually haven't switched back to it because the text colors are a bit too outlandish for my eyes to behold.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 12:17 pm
by M0rtimer
I went through and managed to fix most of the BBC tags in the full BBC editor! Only thing there is the fact still that the text is the wrong color to be clear, but I'm not sure if that's something I can fix. :shifty:

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 12:56 pm
by Rodgeir
Gotta say I am digging the black background theme.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 12:40 am
by Krulle
Okay, tested the Goblins2018 theme.
Nice, black. Restful for my eyes. (I like dark screen backgrounds.)
But the UI is so different, that I switched back to prosilver.
Since I visit other phpBB boards with prosilver, it gives me one common UI, which is the same accross all boards.

Easier to navigate that way, for me.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 1:00 am
by Dusk9
New theme is cool, even if it's taking some getting used to.

Not sure I can get used to the how narrow and squashed everything feels, though. I don't like how much dead space it leaves on the sides of the screen, even with the cool Big Ears art at the top. Combined with the blank space below the poster portait in larger posts, pretty much half the screen is just...empty.

(Also don't like how tiny the poster portraits are, since that just leaves even more empty space.)

Couple of actual issues I've noticed, dunno if it's just me;
- (Non-Global) Moderator names are basically the same colour as the theme background, so can't really see who posted what.
- The "squeezed" column leads to some problems on larger threads with the page tabs and post date overlapping.
► Show Spoiler
- The klik smilies don't really work on this colour background either :shrug:

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 1:43 am
by Glemp
Same, I hate wasted space. I also feel like some of the detailing is a bit too elaborate, like the curly stuff around the top and bottom.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 4:39 am
by Arch Lich Burns
I see we still have bots and a spider (whatever that is)

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 5:00 am
by M0rtimer
Are you talking about the people with the [bot] tags? That's... Natural. Those are search engine bots.

If anyone manages to find another theme that fits better, we can probably include it as an option as well. Maybe it's possible to tweak the current new style a bit more too..?

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 9:18 am
by M0rtimer
Hey guys- Expect a proper, "better" announcement from me later today, but for now know this: the forums are safe again! As in, you can continue posting without any fear that the messages might end up deleted. A couple things are still churning behind the scenes, (Which I'll talk more about later) but there is no longer a risk we'd need to rollback to when we had to start the update.

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 9:26 am
by thinkslogically
Hooray!! Thanks for the update :D

Re: Forum upgrade!

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 6:46 pm
by M0rtimer
Alright, and now for the full announcement...

The new forums are here to stay!

The short version, for those of you want to move on: the forum upgrade is now complete, and posts made should be "save" once more. Changes might still come in the future, but won't change that.

And the slightly more elaborate version: After a couple days of work to guarantee that there are no breaking issues, (Read: issues that would break functionality, or would cause definite problems in the future) we've resolved that and are now certain the forums are stable. Most importantly, should any drastic changes still occur, it's safe to use the current database for it- So we don't need to be afraid of losing any posts.

For the future, we will be looking at improving a couple things still. The new "main" style for instance- By the time I've done writing this, there should have been (experimental) changes to the BBC editor, hopefully make it look better with this new style. Additionally, we might also still be looking at porting over to SM forums- But IF that happens, it will only be if we can do it seamlessly, and it will be with plenty of advance warning. There's probably a couple other things I'm forgetting right now... But that's the main bulk of it.

Most importantly, given some of the concerns that got brought up, I do briefly want to say this: you guys don't need to be afraid of losing everything. Daily backups of the database are made, and unless a meteor hits our planet or ww3 starts, we can always roll back to that. So utter worst cases of data loss should always consist out of a day, at most.

If you guys have any remaining feedback, or do still stumble on potential other issues, you can leave them here. The topic will stay here for a couple more days before I'll move it for that.