Forums Migration

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First of all I'm happy to see several tags finally working again. Of course now I have to fullfill my promise because in my recent messages I deliberately ignored the tags and used other markup BBcode to retain some of the looks.

I do have one comment though; when looking at the {file} and {port} tags the end result now looks quite similar which I don't think is very ideal when it comes to recognition. I'm referring to the fact that www/apache22 nearly looks the same as /usr/local/sbin/httpd colour-wise. It's not directly obvious that the port reference is actually a link which you can click.
 
Beastie said:
What @OJ described in the second quote is exactly what I've been doing since the migration and it's quite annoying.
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Your point is quite clear and has been duly noted.

ShelLuser said:
when looking at the {file} and {port} tags the end result now looks quite similar which I don't think is very ideal when it comes to recognition.
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Agreed and reported. But let's just say that colours are not of the highest concern at the moment.

We are all still coming to grips with the new forum software and by now we've compiled a long list of big and small issues that need sorting out. Please bear with us for the time being.
 
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May I add the "Thanks" functionality to the list of missing things? These, while not really being needed to browse the forum or add content, still serve a purpose of communication by expressing gratitude and appreciation. This is basic politeness which I found really lacking in several forums and which was, IMHO, one of the driving forces here. You could add your "Thank You" to a useful, informative posting, honoring the time and effort put into it without adding a new entry to the thread and watering it down that way.

Logging in to use more functions is annoying, but I can take it.
 
Crivens said:
Logging in to use more functions is annoying, but I can take it.
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I just realized that I can stay logged in so am a lot happier now. This works because I never shut off this computer and never close this browser. I also rarely close any windows that I'm likely to revisit in the next month, so the FreeBSD Forums page is open at all times. Ability to do this will of course vary with the DE that the user has, but it solves a lot of problems if you can do it.
 
Juanitou said:
And the “Mark forums read” link in the “View new posts” search results is also on the list? :OO
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In the more general sense that some links should be better/more available, yes.

jrm said:
Is this list available so we stop bugging you with the same requests?
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Some of the things on that list are moderator-/admin-specific (yes, we have our own issues as well because phpBB also differs from vBulletin behind the scenes), but I'll ask if part of it can be published. In any case, you can always post complaints/suggestions in this thread. It's no big deal if it's already on the list. If anything, it may increase our sense of what you folks find important.
 
Re: Forums RSS

derekschrock said:
Did the latest update to the forums break (totally remove) RSS?
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Hi,

I did not see any answer to this. I really liked the RSS feature. Is it going to be implemented?
 
anlashok said:
One thing I've noticed as being missing is that posts used to get edited titles if the problem being asked about was [solved] in the ensuing discussion. Now there is no obvious indication in the post title if the problem was resolved, so has that indication been lost from historical posts? It was a very useful feature when trying to find solutions to problems you were experiencing.
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phpBB seems to support this, however it is not being activated. [link=http://www.rockettheme.com/forum/index.php?f=15&t=169168&rb_v=viewtopic]Here is how[/link] it should look like (depending on the template used).
 
Hi friends!

I see many messages sent to the previous forum having uppercased [.FILE] tags and several others while on new forum it doesn't shows as supposed, but just text of code.

Of course you need to disable case sensitivity for tags, but if it 's difficult why not use some primitive SQL query like:
Code: 
UPDATE forum_messages AS aa 
SET aa.messageText=REPLACE(REPLACE(aa,messageText,'[FILE]','file'),'[/FILE]','[/file]')
 
ORTO-DOX said:
Of course you need to disable case sensitivity for tags
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Actually, case sensitivity is not the problem (anymore). The real problem is that for some reason phpBB refuses to parse BBCode in posts imported from the old vBulletin-driven forum. If we do a "null edit" (click edit, change nothing, click Submit) the formatting works again. But obviously we couldn't possibly do this for all imported posts. We're aware of the problem and I try to make these null edits whenever possible, but there's of course only so much I can do. Thanks for mentioning it, though!

Edit: On second thought, case sensitivity might have something to do with it after all: phpBB accepts uppercase tags alright, but converts them to lower case whenever you submit or even preview (feel free to try for yourself). That probably explains the behaviour we're seeing. It's being looked into.
 
It might be the character encoding as well, which prevents parsing/detecting special tags. This explains why resubmitting works.
 
matoatlantis said:
Oh, ugh. When I saw the new forums one thought came to my mind: "Is it April 1st ?" But it seems like a bad dream coming true :(.
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I agree. I go away on vacation and when I get back, I see this. Ick. That "Ick" is reserved for the software - I appreciate the hard work done behind-the-scenes by all the volunteers. Having said that, doing a test migration on a staging server (with a snapshot of the vBulletin data) and inviting users to test it would have discovered these issues and allowed time to address them before going forward with the actual migration.

Unless there was some major problem with the vBulletin software (as opposed to license or pricing), I'd have thought that the ideal replacement would be something that could be "skinned" to act as close to vBulletin as possible (including not breaking all old links into the forums). I admit to being completely unaware of whether something like that exists.

Personally, I prefer vBulletin but can tolerate most forum software. There are exceptions, though - APC switched from some horrible forum software to an even worse one (Jive) and DBSTalk switched from vBulletin to IP.Board. I no longer participate in those forums solely due to the forum software changes.
 
Terry_Kennedy said:
Ick. That "Ick" is reserved for the software - I appreciate the hard work done behind-the-scenes by all the volunteers.
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Well, the software is one aspect. For me it's the current "noisy" way in which threads are displayed which somewhat 'spoils' the experience for me a bit. I think it's way too distracting and sometimes hard to get a good overlook of when a message stops and when the next one starts.

But phpBB itself doesn't have to be all that bad, though I personally prefer SMF. In fact, one of my favourite forums (the Ableton forum) also uses phpBB and quite frankly I never felt that their interface was intrusive or annoying in any way. Hmm, 3461 messages in 4 years over there :)

Terry_Kennedy said:
Unless there was some major problem with the vBulletin software (as opposed to license or pricing), I'd have thought that the ideal replacement would be something that could be "skinned" to act as close to vBulletin as possible (including not breaking all old links into the forums). I admit to being completely unaware of whether something like that exists...
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If you look at another forum I used to frequent, the Propellerhead forums, then I think it becomes quite obvious why the people behind the FreeBSD forum took such drastic steps. At least at the time of writing.

Propellerhead is a company which specializes in music software, one of their flagship products being Reason, and their forum has always been a huge asset for their supporting options. A company like Propellerhead software would not close down their forum on a whim. Yet a total lock down is exactly what they went for, as you can see. (Edit: For the people who don't feel like following the link: the Propellerhead forums also used vBulletin).

I'm a systems administrator myself and because I'm administrating a few customer forums (read: keeping the used software up to date, I don't participate in their stuff) I'm also keeping some eye open for reports on security issues. Let's just say that vBulletin has been mentioned to have severe security issues several times before already.

To be perfectly honest here it's that knowledge alone which didn't make me bail out when I got confronted with this setup :) Well, that and the solid proof that the people behind this place are obviously doing their utmost best to get things back up and running. That deserves some respect and patience too in my opinion.
 
Terry_Kennedy said:
Unless there was some major problem with the vBulletin software
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There was.

It's probably okay to reveal that this migration was a surprise even for the moderators. But the admins had to act quickly mainly because a recently discovered vulnerability in the old forum software led to the server being (ab)used as a spam relay and this could not be easily patched or otherwise fixed. Upgrading to a newer and shinier version of vBulletin was reportedly considered, but abandoned in favour of phpBB. With hindsight being 20/20 that probably wasn't the best idea ever, but as I said the admins had to act fast and there was little or no time for any testing that I'm pretty damn sure would have otherwise been done first.

FWIW, we're contemplating where to go from here, be it sticking with phpBB if it can be sufficiently fixed, or migrating again to something else (read: better IMHO). But at least these forums are safe again for now. And that was obviously the top priority.

Hope this puts you at ease, at least for the time being. As said earlier: please bear with us. Stuff is being worked on and we're sorry for the inconvenience but something had to be done stat.

Edit: @ShelLuser finished his post before I finished mine. But if anything I'm rather confident that, between them, those two posts do a decent job at painting a pretty clear picture of why this sudden change was deemed necessary.
 
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fonz said:
t's probably okay to reveal that this migration was a surprise even for the moderators. But the admins had to act quickly mainly because a recently discovered vulnerability in the old forum software led to the server being (ab)used as a spam relay and this could not be easily patched or otherwise fixed. Upgrading to a newer and shinier version of vBulletin was reportedly considered, but abandoned in favour of phpBB. With hindsight being 20/20 that probably wasn't the best idea ever, but as I said the admins had to act fast and there was little or no time for any testing that I'm pretty damn sure would have otherwise been done first.
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Well, that makes the changeover a great deal more understandable - thanks for the explanation.

That's one of the problems running a heavily-customized version of any forum software - it becomes unworkable to try to simply update the software, as all of the customizations need to be re-integrated. Perhaps some forum software package can be found which can handle (almost) all of this site's customizations via plugins and configuration files, so that updating will be less of a problem.

FWIW, we're contemplating where to go from here, be it sticking with phpBB if it can be sufficiently fixed, or migrating again to something else (read: better IMHO). But at least these forums are safe again for now. And that was obviously the top priority.
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Understood. The only issue I can see with moving out of phpBB is that that's another data import into a third forum package, where tags, etc. can get mangled even further. It would be great if that hypothetical third package could import the archived vBulletin data, then apply only the posts made in phpBB since then to the forum. That way the vast majority of data would only have gone through a single import cycle. It is probably better to work on morphing phpBB into something that matches your requirements (subject to the "hard to update" comment above - just about every forum package has had security issues which required patching or updating).

Hope this puts you at ease, at least for the time being. As said earlier: please bear with us. Stuff is being worked on and we're sorry for the inconvenience but something had to be done stat.
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No problem - I'll wait and see how things develop.

Thanks!
 
vanessa said:
However I'd rather appreciate to pull all list posters to the forum and close the lists. It is annoying to always search for information in two places. Not to talk about the (missing) formatting of the lists.
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If the (relatively!) poor standard of writing on the mailing lists bugs you, imagine what it does to me (nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more). I find myself looking for an edit button when reading my e-mail not quite as rarely as you'd hope :r §e :pP
 
fonz said:
If the (relatively!) poor standard of writing on the mailing lists bugs you, imagine what it does to me (nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more). I find myself looking for an edit button when reading my e-mail not quite as rarely as you'd hope :r §e :pP
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Well, I can actually live with the mis-formatting, although it is neither nice nor helpful. What really bugs me with the lists is that their existence prevents better communication. Really! People seeking advice and help read the forum, the gurus use the mailing list. These two groups rarely find themselves in the forum.

The concept of a mailing list dates back to the times when it was 'fancy' and 'nice' to receive emails. Nowadays only hard core developers can stand the flood of emails to a specific topic (list) just because they 'live' with that subject. 'Normal' lists readers like me feel overwhelmed even with the daily digest emails, not to talk about the 'just-in-time' deliveries.

Another point is the obscure way of finding information in the lists. When not reading each and every incoming mail (or at least the daily digests), one has to use the search function, which is all but intuitive and user friendly. Why f.i. do I have to know which list the needed information might be in, in order to search for it?!

Fortunately there is Google (my tip: site:lists.freebsd.org) but the fact that valuable information is split in two places with Google being the only 'glue' is disappointing :(
 
fonz said:
Terry_Kennedy said:
Unless there was some major problem with the vBulletin software
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There was.
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Please accept this "Thank You" for the informative posting. These reasons are all too understandable.
 
vanessa said:
The concept of a mailing list dates back to the times when it was 'fancy' and 'nice' to receive emails. Nowadays only hard core developers can stand the flood of emails to a specific topic (list) just because they 'live' with that subject. 'Normal' lists readers like me feel overwhelmed even with the daily digest emails, not to talk about the 'just-in-time' deliveries.
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You could dust off your newsreader and keep up with the mailing lists with Gmane. Depending on the list you may or may not need to subscribe, but even if you do, you can then turn off mail deliveries. This way you aren't inundated with mail and can easily search the archives.

Mailing lists have advantages. They don't tend to get hacked as often and there isn't a single copy of all the messages. Perhaps some sort of automatic posting of the mailing list messages to the forums would be doable?
 
jrm said:
Mailing lists have advantages. They don't tend to get hacked as often and there isn't a single copy of all the messages.
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Plus e-mail is probably easier to deal with in a non-X environment.
 
You guys miss my point. I don't state that mailing lists are 'bad' per se. What I'm saying is that the FreeBSD lists are contra-productive by competing with the forum, and a forum does have more advantages compared to mailing lists. I even totally ignored the formatting issue in order to be clear.
 
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