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Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 6:03 am
by tierra
There's a lot of ground to cover here today with the major upgrade of the forums from phpBB 2.x to phpBB 3.x. Let me go over the important details first here.

Password Reset may be Required

For those of you with existing accounts, some have noticed that the new forums do not work with your old password. The conversion to phpBB 3.x does not seem to support everyone's old password hashes, so some of you will be required to go through the "Forgot my password" feature on the login page in order to reset your password. You will need to know both your username and your email address. Please don't hesitate to contact me at [email protected] if you are having problems with this.

wxAwards are Missing

We have had a custom-written MOD powering this feature on the phpBB 2.x forums, however, this has not been rewritten for the new forums. I do still have the full records for everyone's points, and we will be looking into replacing it with a similar MOD soon with the points transferred over.

Code Highlighting

This feature is missing right now, however, I plan to have this back soon.

Additional Language Packs

I have installed what I think will be the most important language packs on the forums. This includes French, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Russian, and Spanish. While everything that comes with the new forums should be translated, anything that has been added in a extra MOD we have installed (such as marking topics as solved, or adding code highlighting) may not be translated. If you spot this, and can help me translate, I'll be glad to fix it.

Search Engine Compatible Now

As we are now running on a more powerful server, and the phpBB 3.x upgrade also helps the search engine crawlers behave themselves a lot better, the forums are now open to crawlers again finally. This will allow you to soon use the power of Google (and others) to find specific posts on these forums if the built-in search up top can't seem to help you.

Anything Else?

Please let me know if you see anything else that either isn't working, missing, or could be improved.

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 8:45 am
by Allonii
Thanks for the upgrade. The forum looks modern now.

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 9:46 am
by doublemax
Does the new forum software actually have any advantage over the old one? I personally don't like it at all.

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 12:45 pm
by Auria
Thanks, when everything is migrated surely we will appreciate the new features :)

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 2:25 pm
by tierra
doublemax wrote:Does the new forum software actually have any advantage over the old one? I personally don't like it at all.
While this upgrade has tons of new features, especially in regards to a new moderator control panel that makes moderation several times easier, the now built-in file attachments system (rather than being installed as a MOD) with better file type detection and handling, new ATOM feeds for all forums, individual forums, or even individual topics, and a full rewrite of the entire administration backend (hey, we need to take care of ourselves sometimes too), this was not a forum migration - it was an upgrade. We were running on phpBB 2.0, which has not been officially supported since January 1st, 2009. There has been several new exploits discovered with phpBB 2.0 in that 2.5 year time frame that have just been left open without a fix, and for all I know (since it was never discovered why), one of those exploits may have been the reason the forum went down last week. This upgrade was absolutely required, there was no choice in the matter, it had to be done eventually.

Additionally, we had hacked our own forums with phpBB 2 in order to even be able to run the International forums section at all. phpBB 2 was not intended to run more than one language on a single board at a time, and was not correctly handling the character encoding for all the posts correctly with our hack. This was something that was slowly catching up with us over time. The built-in search was completely useless for anything in the Chinese or Russian forums (making it impossible to find anything in those forums since we had also been blocking search engine crawlers too). It took us weeks to even find a way to fix the character encodings before we could even perform the upgrade (this has been planned since well before the forums went down last week).

Also, since phpBB 2.0 has not been supported, neither have our MODs we had installed. We haven't been able to upgrade the GeSHi code syntax highlighter, the file attachments MOD (as mentioned above), or any other MODs we had installed.

Now, a lot of the new features have been disabled right now just because we performed an upgrade and not a new installation. phpBB tried to stick as closely as possible with all of our existing forum settings, so we will be discovering new features and enabling them as time goes on here until we've really become more comfortable with how everything is working.

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 3:46 pm
by ouch67
lol, the spam bots are already trying to take over. I see 2 bot posts already.

phpbb forums are so hackable apparently. Seriously, I've yet to see one that isn't completely taken over, hacked, infested with spam bots, or that doesn't get corrupted losing posts.

Why not use something else? There are plenty of nicer alternatives out there.

My only complaint with the looks is that user names are displayed on the right instead of left, just seems backwards to me.

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:26 pm
by briceandre
First of all, thank for the time spent on this update. I understand that it is important to keep the forum up-to-date in order to avoid big troubles and I imagine this probably took a lot of your time.

[quote]My only complaint with the looks is that user names are displayed on the right instead of left, just seems backwards to me.[/quote]

I agree with ouch67 on this point. If it's not possible to change, I suppose we will accustom to that. But, if this is simple to change, then I think it would be more 'natural' to get it on the left.

I also just noticed that all tags icons (bold, quote, url, etc.) are no more present when you write a message. I don't know if this is no more available or if we need to configure something in the user preferences ?

Regards,
Brice

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:31 pm
by briceandre
Another small thing that, I think, was better in previous version is the way the 'sticky' subjects are displayed in the list of subjects. In previous version, you could easily identify which ones were sticky (If I remember correctly, they were in a different background color). Now, only a small icon changes on the left of the topic. So, it's a little less visible when you quickly look to find the first new subject of a message.
But, once again, it's just a small remark and if it's not possible to change it easily, I think we can live with this.

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:57 pm
by Auria
Names displayed on right or left just seems to be a theme thing; by switching to another theme or modifying the theme we apparently can get them on the left :

http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/prosilv ... s-on-left/

(note that I personnally don't really care about this)

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 5:19 pm
by tierra
briceandre wrote:I also just noticed that all tags icons (bold, quote, url, etc.) are no more present when you write a message. I don't know if this is no more available or if we need to configure something in the user preferences ?
The buttons for all these should show up right in between the post subject and the post body boxes in the same place they were before. It no longer gives you the actual BBCode hints when you hover over them though. On the right hand side, there's a link to a page explaining the BBCodes available to use if you choose not to use the buttons above the post window. If you haven't noticed, I just used them in my announcement post, and also this one. ;)

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 7:29 pm
by briceandre
The buttons for all these should show up right in between the post subject and the post body boxes in the same place they were before. It no longer gives you the actual BBCode hints when you hover over them though. On the right hand side, there's a link to a page explaining the BBCodes available to use if you choose not to use the buttons above the post window. If you haven't noticed, I just used them in my announcement post, and also this one. ;)
Yes, I see them now. But I am pretty sure that at the time of writing previous post, they were not present. At the place where all simleys are located, I had some text telling me that BBCodes were disabled, but with no button to activate them. Between previous post and now, I navigated in user preferences, but I don't think I modified any option.

But OK, everything seems to work now. I will see if problem still occur in the future...

Regards,
Brice

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 11:35 pm
by Auria
briceandre wrote:
The buttons for all these should show up right in between the post subject and the post body boxes in the same place they were before. It no longer gives you the actual BBCode hints when you hover over them though. On the right hand side, there's a link to a page explaining the BBCodes available to use if you choose not to use the buttons above the post window. If you haven't noticed, I just used them in my announcement post, and also this one. ;)
Yes, I see them now. But I am pretty sure that at the time of writing previous post, they were not present. At the place where all simleys are located, I had some text telling me that BBCodes were disabled, but with no button to activate them. Between previous post and now, I navigated in user preferences, but I don't think I modified any option.

But OK, everything seems to work now. I will see if problem still occur in the future...

Regards,
Brice
Yeah the same happened to me, but now things appear to be fine

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2011 10:14 pm
by muman
Why do my posts need to be reviewed by a moderator before being posted?

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 2:34 pm
by tierra
muman wrote:Why do my posts need to be reviewed by a moderator before being posted?
As a newly registered user, the first few posts you make are reviewed by a moderator to ensure they aren't spam or to make sure you understand which forum your post belongs to. After the first few, your posts no longer require approval.

Re: Forums Upgrade - June 22, 2011

Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2011 5:07 pm
by tierra
I have now converted over the old Accepted Answers to the new solved topic format for the new board. All old posts that were marked as solved before should now be marked as solved again.