Forums Migration

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brd@

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Hi everyone,

I wanted to give you a heads up, that today I will be migrating The FreeBSD Forums from vBulletin to phpBB.

The migration will take about two hours and during that time, the Forum will be inaccessible.

Once the migration is complete everyone will have to reset their passwords via email. Please make sure your email address is up to date.

Regards,
Brad Davis
 
Part of the reasons for this migration is vBulletin has changed the product a lot. It is so much more than just a forum now. It has tons of extra things that we do not want or need. Plus migrating to an open source solution has its advantages as well.
 
I wonder if SMF (simple machines forum) would have done as well. Also, a few posts show obsolete TAGS maybe, since the migration.
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
Also, a few posts show obsolete TAGS maybe, since the migration.
I'm pretty sure someone is fixing that right now. Our old vBulletin setup was probably quite heavily customised, so there will undoubtedly be some manual labour involved.

This migration must have been one of the more interesting birthday presents I ever got, though :beergrin
 
Yeah, I am working on bringing everything back... it is going to take a bit though.
 
I would thank you for your efforts but can't find the button to do so anymore. Is that mechanism being dropped or will there be something similar?
 
I hate change, but in this case I see a good reason for it. Being active on several forums that use vBulletin, I've grown to hate it. Besides, as you say brd, we're moving to open source. Yay! And thanks for your work.

BTW, I see some things missing. I'll wait patiently as there is no doubt a lot of work yet to be done, but in a while perhaps it would be useful to start a thread for "missing bits" reports.
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
I wonder if SMF (simple machines forum) would have done as well. Also, a few posts show obsolete TAGS maybe, since the migration.
Same here, I'm kind of surprised to see this change. Also considering how Simple Machines Forum is licensed under the BSD license whereas phpBB uses the GPL. Well, that and it seems to me that SMF comes closer to vBulletin than phpBB but that comment could be biased since I haven't looked back to phpBB ever since I discovered SMF ;)

I can't comment on the change itself yet. In general I'm not too fond of phpBB but we'll see how this goes.

Edit (have to try out everything)

So we're back only a few hours and already the forum is flooded with spam? I know you guys are still at it so I'm not commenting on that, but I will say that I sincerely hope that this isn't a forebode for the future. phpBB has a certain reputation after all and I'd honestly hate to see stuff like that happening to this place.

One constructive comment though: what I immediately noticed was that control-b and control-i don't insert any BBCode at the moment.

Another thing, but that's also somewhat personal preference, but I think that the current BSD colour scheme makes it harder to differentiate between messages if a code block is being used. The message layout switches from dark (grey) to white or "whitish". But the code block is also white, so if there is no or one sentence after the code block it's easy to miss the beginning of the next message due to the colour scheme.

If you switch to the prosilver theme then the difference between messages becomes easier to spot because the "message differentiation colours" (to give it a name) strongly differs from the colours used in the code block.

As said; I'm aware that this might be personal preference but I figured I'd mention it anyway.
 
Forums are forums are forums. That said English is read from left to right. Having the posting person's name/stats on the right disrupts that natural workflow and is counter-intutive.
 
Thanks for the feedback.

I noticed the spam problem and got it sorted. From the import the guest user had access to post in all the forums and so you can see what happened. We should be better off now.

I will take a look at the color schemes tomorrow. Currently I know I am still missing a thanks mod, and that is still on the todo list. Let me know if I am forgetting anything else :)

Thanks!
 
I am also missing a way to view today's posts. I had to log in to read this.
 
About the spam. This may not be useful, but I thought I'd mention it just in case. I see that there are currently 81 visitors. This is at a time when there used to not be much action here. I'm guessing that having "Powered by phpBB" in the footer is not a good idea. Likely bots will look for that. I have a PunBB forum and I see that in the search terms.
 
Minor annoyance: passwords require mixed case and numbers.

What exactly is the reasoning behind this? I understand having strong passwords is often important, but shouldn't that be a decision for the user to use, not the forum? Relevant: http://xkcd.com/936/

Personally, I don't think strong passwords matter for a forum; in fact, it just increases the likelyhood of forgetting said password.
 
Thank you for the migration, Brad!

OJ said:
Also missing a way to view today's posts. I had to log in to read this.
+1 for that. It's absolutely necessary. I believe the View active topics link is supposed to do that, but it currently returns an empty page ("No suitable matches were found").

fonz said:
This migration must have been one of the more interesting birthday presents I ever got, though :beergrin
Then happy birthday! :beer
 
Yes, the password rules. Makes one to use the same password all over the places. The new layout is a change, and all change is annoying at the start. I say let's try it for a week and then see if it is worth the change.

Also, I am +1 for "today's posts"
 
You have to remember we're working from a baseline of default settings. Things will change over time. The password requirements have been relaxed now (except we need a minimum of eight positions).
 
I want to add: Thanks to all the Technical Staff of the FreeBSD Forums which did a fine job. The Forums migration was started by surprise for almost all regular members.

Please, keep up the good work :beer
 
Yes, please keep it up.

In case someone got the impression I was complaining, I am not. All change is annoying (at least at my age ;)), but I know this and I want to first check it out before I start nagging. Yes, the change came as a surprise, but it also prevented it being stuck in a discussion.

Again, let's at least try it for a week and then go for the backup tape, if need be.

Oh, and I found that links now do not open a new tab in the browser and that inserting named links is not as straightforward as it used to be. But that is most likely also a default.

All in all, it is pretty impressive to switch the forum around without so much trouble. Also, I would be rather suspicious when my old password would work, that would indicate it was not salted.
 
I love it. But I'm in a phpbb.com team group so I might not be that objective. Remember that phpBB offers a database modification that makes large forums a lot faster and have some opcache options as well.
 
Nightweaver said:
vermaden said:
@brd

I haven't noticed 'Mark Forums Read'.

On the front page top right corner.

After using the forums for half a day I think that the 'Mark Forums Read' link should be directly on the search results list (View new posts list).
 
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