The forum in the upcoming weeks

[Martijn Meerts]

It's been talked about for a LONG time, and it's sort of turning into a mythical being, or just a really bad soap opera, but ... We're still working on new software ;)

 

With that out of the way, there have been a series of issues as of late, both visible to the user (like the signature spam bots) as well as system-related issues. We are now working on getting the new software up and running before the end of the year at the latest.

 

While a lot of things can be done on a local test install of the forum, some things we need to test on a forum running on the actual server. There is a chance the forum might seem slow while we do testing, there's a small chance it may crash altogether. Obviously we'll try not to crash the thing, but software can be strange sometimes.

 

Once we're happy with the new setup, we'll announce a date on which we'll be doing the actual switch. On that day the current forum will be locked down and closed off so we can migrate all the users, forums, permissions, posts, etc. to the new system. Test migrations show most data gets migrated as it should, but Murphy's law dictates that the 1 time it should go smooth, it won't :)

 

 

As mentioned in other threads about new software, feel free to send us your ideas/feature requests, and we'll see what we can do :)

[Densha]

Whoo, just when the forum stopped sending me email notifications. It makes no sense why it stopped sending them, but like the other bugs and stuff I'll wait patiently for the new software.

 

Again, and I presume you've already noted, it would be great if the "likes" will be migrated and that the new system will incorporate such a system too. It would be a pity if we would lose that functionality. At least I think so. ;)

 

I'd love to read anything on what functions will be incorporated in the new software, as there were some discussions about the wiki and such before.

[CaptOblivious]

Whoo, just when the forum stopped sending me email notifications. It makes no sense why it stopped sending them, but like the other bugs and stuff I'll wait patiently for the new software.

 

That was probably me. I had to shut off forum-sent email for a while, as some spammers had figured out a way to hack the forum to spew spam…

[Martijn Meerts]

The reason it stopped sending email notifications is that we had to turn off the email system temporarily ;)

 

The likes should be migrated, but I haven't confirmed this, the likes system in the current software is a plugin, and not something that's built in. The new forum does have it built in, but I believe it works a bit differently. It's definitely something we'll need to look at when doing test migrations.

 

Among the things that will be implemented (apart from general improvements):

 

- Adding tags to topics

- Semi-automatic spam filter (max x posts per xx seconds/minutes, online text analysing)

- No signature spam through allowing custom signatures only for people with at least xx posts

- Chat box

- Much improved search

- Much, much, much better recent/unread posts system

- Much easier 'mark as read' feature

- Login/register using facebook/twitter

- Social stuff such as facebook like, post on facebook, post on twitter, google+, digg, etc.

- Custom pages (for example, an external RSS feed mashup page, a links page, etc)

- Option to create a database of searchable/categorisable articles (for example decoder installs)

- Old links will be redirected to their new version, so no old links floating around get broken

 

 

Not everything will be implemented all at once, but much of the above listed is part of the core software. Really only the custom pages and database are an add-on.

 

From the current forum, the gallery, blogs, calendar and wiki will not be migrated. We'll keep the gallery data in case we'll set up a new one at some point, but from earlier polls it's shown very few people use those features.

 

 

We're as of yet uncertain about using things like a reputation system (it comes built in), as it can create tension. The same goes for showing the number of posts or how many likes someone has received.

[Densha]

Seriously, why are people doing that?

 

It sounds good, but I hate social stuff. Well, I don't mind as long it's just on the front page or something but I'm not looking forward to it if every post would feature dozens of buttons for social networks IMHO. I'm not sure whether login using social networks would be useful and good, but honestly I don't know. I just like the simplicity of websites (and this forum) without tons of social network buttons etc. I think you've already thought about that a bit though...

 

What will happen to the current links to the gallery? Will they become 404's?

 

Again, IMO don't use reputation systems, for both simplicity as well as the reasons you mention. Number of posts is something I personally wouldn't want to miss, and the likes is up to you. But that's only on the profile page, putting number of posts with on every post is useless.

[Lawrence]

Looking forward to the change over and I hope it all goes smoothly, I know how difficult it is keeping an older forum secure for it's members so this will be a big step for JNS and it's members.

If it crashes, it crashes, as long as we get it back at some stage I'll be happy.  Good luck with the switch guys

[Martijn Meerts]

Densha, the social buttons are limited to 1 set per topic, and they're a series of small icons at the bottom of the page. It's easy to toggle on or off, so if it causes issues they'll be gone in no time. Logging on/registering through facebook/twitter is actually just about the only thing I like about facebook. Whether it'll be used or not remains to be seen.. But again, they're not all over the forum, but restricted to the login and register forms really.

 

I'm actually not sure what'll happen to the gallery links, I haven't really thought of that. There's a good change they'll turn into 404's, or at least just show as missing images. We're keeping the gallery images, so if necessary posts with missing images could be reported and we'll manually add them. The other option is to spend a little extra on getting the gallery plugin. It wouldn't be unthinkable that the current gallery system wasn't used much because it wasn't really all that user friendly ;)

 

Overall, the new forum will actually be less cluttered than the current one ;)

 

 

Lawrence, we're not really expecting any crashes (knock on wood :)), the new software is well written and support is quite fast (even though I've read stories saying otherwise). If something goes wrong, it'll likely be something like certain posts not migrating well, or missing images and the likes.

[disturbman]

I never saw the point of linking forums and social medias. The Facebook log in is a good idea but the rest...

[Martijn Meerts]

To be honest, I don't think I've ever actually used any of the social sharing buttons on any site ;)

 

 

Attached is a sneak peak of the new forum index. Obviously it's missing the actual forums listing, and the default profile icon is a bit messed up, but it's a work in progress.

[Martijn Meerts]

Okay, you guys are attaching way too many files    .. There's 1.68Gb worth of files attached to various posts ...

 

Also, there's 1.14Gb worth of files in the gallery, so I guess it's being used a bit more than we initially thought :)

[cteno4]

Attached is a sneak peak of the new forum index. Obviously it's missing the actual forums listing, and the default profile icon is a bit messed up, but it's a work in progress.

 

nice very clean and simple design and not terribly different than the current layout so little retraining to do!

 

best of luck with the conversion.

 

jeff

[bill937ca]

Okay, you guys are attaching way too many files    .. There's 1.68Gb worth of files attached to various posts ...

 

Do those files need to stay there forever?

[Densha]

Okay, you guys are attaching way too many files    .. There's 1.68Gb worth of files attached to various posts ...

 

Also, there's 1.14Gb worth of files in the gallery, so I guess it's being used a bit more than we initially thought :)

Maybe because of uploading images in original uncompressed size? I'm not saying people who do that are at fault (I think I did myself once too) but it's a fact.

Looking at recent images in the gallery it doesn't seem to used much but there's still stuff over there, it would be a pity if we couldn't access some of that but on the other side there's a lot of useless stuff in there too.

[Martijn Meerts]

Bill, there's no need to worry about the amount of files, it just took a while to make a local copy of them. I'm not sure what our hard drive limit on the VPS is, but additional hard drive space usually isn't expensive.

 

We could get rid of some by archiving older posts for example, but that's something we can look at when needed.

 

 

Densha, there's several massive images floating around :) I think the new software has much more options to control that, but I haven't quite gotten into the details yet. The gallery images won't be lost though, after playing a bit with a demo of the gallery in the new software, I went ahead and bought a license. The new system will be a lot easier to use, and integrates really well with the forum, so it's really easy to link to gallery images in a post.

[Martijn Meerts]

Quick update..

 

I spent some time testing the conversion scripts from the old to the new database. I came across several problems with profile pictures and attachments, which I fixed. I also adjusted the script to also convert likes. Emoticons seem a bit of a weird beast as well. The images themselves get converted, but the placeholders in the posts don't actually get replaced ..

 

All in all though, we're making good progress :)

 

 

Edit: seems I just need to run some maintenance script to get emoticons to work, so 1 step closer to the switch.

 

On a side note, it's interesting seeing the forum after converting all the content.. It's looking rather good, even if the theme isn't done yet ;)

[Martijn Meerts]

In typical Murphy's law fashion, just when I think I'm getting somewhere, a new version of the forum software is released :)

 

Luckily it's not a major version, and it looks like it'll be an easy upgrade. Of course, it's actually a good way see how the upgrade process works.

 

Also, attached is a screenshot of the topics list within a sub forum, including pagination, 'pinned' tag for sticky topics, and a 'hot' tag for topics with a minimum number of replies.

[Densha]

Recently the forum is damn slow, there are times I can't access the website at all, and the amounts of bugs and other weird stuff have been increasing steadily.

I presume it's only the forum software causing this and that there's nothing happening with the server?

 

On-topic: it's looking really good so far, I like the profile icons on the right too and it's looking really clean.

[bikkuri bahn]

Ditto-the forum is slow, molasses slow, slower than dial-up...Looking forward to the new version.

[Martijn Meerts]

Not sure what's causing the slow downs, but I've noticed them myself as well. Server has also been unreachable occasionally.

[CaptOblivious]

That is interesting, I hadn't noticed the slowness myself. There is a chance this is a server issue, and not just the forum software. Will see if I can suss out what might be going on.

[Densha]

Yesterday at the end of the day the forum was a bit faster, but this morning it's slow again. I also got this error message.

[disturbman]

Gosh... I got the exact same message when trying to open this thread to read Densha's message and then the forum freezed when I tried to answer it...

[Densha]

Two more:

[CaptOblivious]

This is a server issue. Been getting a lot of notifications that services had to restart. This might be a hiccup, or worse. Watching the logs to try and find a cause. We might be changing service providers in the near future too if this keeps up, but our Costs would go way up too...

[marknewton]

Don, I'll admit to my ignorance here - what are reputation systems?

 

Reading this thread makes me realise how much work is going on behind the scenes to run and manage the forum, so it's a good opportunity for me to say thank you to everybody involved for putting in the time and effort. I really do appreciate it! 

 

Cheers,

 

Mark.