Forum upgrade (with new warning)

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I just upgraded the forums again - many problems should be fixed now. Unfortunately, I have to go through and update the Forge look to the forum, so if you were using that style, you'll have to live with the default look for now.

More to come.

[Christopher Kubasik]

I like it.  A lot.

A question.  Some of the thread titles are bold, while others are... not.

What does that mean?

Christopher

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Christopher - don't know yet. Will find out.

All:

I've had two reported incidents this morning of people using HTML in their message and having it get cut off. If this happens to you, let me know, including exactly which message it was.

A great way to prevent this from happening is using what's called BBCode - the formatting code of the board. You can see buttons above when posting that will let you use it, or you can use it just like HTML. (For the most part, BBCode looks like HTML with square brackets instead of angled brackets.) The board knows how to handle this a lot better.

If real problems continue, I may temporarily turn HTML off in the forums while I investigate. BBCode will still work if that happens.

[Ron Edwards]

Many thanks to Clinton for his work and his patience with those who, like me, tend to get all freaked out when the forums do something odd.

The nice thing about Clinton's management, to me, is that if the forum functions change at the Forge, they are always about improving how things work, not about simple bells & whistles or details of format. Too many changes of the latter type tend to create an ongoing instability, I think. If things look different one day at the Forge, you can bet that it reflects something working differently, and better. (Granted, minor hitches occur during the transition, and it usually takes a few posts to figure out how.)

Best,
Ron

[Blake Hutchins]

Great job, Clinton!

And may I add to that:  thank God for the non-proliferation of all those vile species of smilies.  They're like locusts on the boards that use 'em.

Best,

Blake

[Mike Holmes]

I must say that the fora are downloading much more quickly than they had been for me previously. Did yu do something to optimize performance, Clinton? That's the best improvement one can imagine.

Mike

[Clinton R. Nixon]

One of the features of the upgrade I liked the most was the increased speed of database queries and page loads - much, much faster overall.

Also - I turned off smilies and 'avatars' (the pics beside people's names) the first day I started the forums and have kept them off since. I hate those things, too.

Just to let everyone know, here's a list of the features in the update:

   * Major update of posting and related search functions (fixing various issues and increasing speed)
   * Fixed highlighting code for viewtopic and search
   * Reduced size of several files and functions
   * Improved user feedback of disallowed usernames
   * Finished implemention of various additional features
   * Fixed various user, group and forum permissions problems
   * Fixed 'blank' profile and DB utilities problems on submit
   * Fixed incorrect language being used in email subjects
   * Fixed issues with incorrect private message new/unread counts
   * Automatically forward users to login screen in more situations
   * AEnabled (coloured) online indication of moderators and admins
   * Enabled maximum online user count
   * Altered online user count to ignore duplicate IPs (will now underestimate rather than overestimate)
   * Enabled viewing of users browsing each forum
   * Fixed (hopefully) display of overlayed ICQ icon in Netscape
   * Hidden usergroups are now completely hidden from view

[Jürgen Mayer]

Christopher, Clinton - I think the bold topic titles are for topics that you didn't ever open yet.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Clinton,

I've had two reported incidents this morning of people using HTML in their message and having it get cut off.

I've seen the Forge guidelines recommending BBcode because of HTML-related errors, but if the phpBB folks come up with a solution to the HTML issue, I'd like to see it implemented, and for one reason only: on the off chance that I need to repurpose something subsequent to writing it to the Forge, a chunk of WFD rules clarifications or perhaps even an entire post, to the rules on my website or to a thread on Gaming Outpost or something, it makes more sense for me to just be in the habit of coding HTML for links and formatting.

And awkwardly, I've noticed that if I code open and close PRE tags at the end of a post, I don't get the content truncation problem.

And is there any way you can turn on HTML character entities?

Thanks,

Paul

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Ditto for me, Paul. It would fine with square brackets but the HTML style brackets cause messages to get cutt off.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Paul,

This is a stupid question, because I'm supposed to be some sort of web designer, but what exactly do you mean by "HTML character entities?"

-Clinton

[Paul Czege]

Hey Clinton,

You know how you make a non-breaking space by sandwiching "#160" in between an ampersand and a semicolon? HTML character entities are all the characters you can create in HTML like that, the copyright symbol, em dashes, en dashes, greater than and less than symbols that don't get interpreted as code, etc. They worked in the Forge's previous install of phpBB.

Paul