Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 9:55 pm

I've brought up the new forums using phpBB2. I have transferred all of the users and posts (as of last night) from the current forums into the new forums.

Because the method for storing the password is different between the two systems, there is no way to transfer your forum password. So, when you go to the Login page for the new forum, click the "I lost my password" link and it will send a new password to your email address. You can then login with the new password and then go to your Profile to change your password back to whatever you want.

Go ahead and play in the new forums. If all looks good after a couple of days, I'll make sure the topics are up to date and then do the official switch over.

The new forums are at: http://www.emobius.com/phpbb

A couple of minor issues I have noted already:

1) Any post with an Image in it must be resubmitted for some reason for the image to reappear.

2) Looks like this might be true of all BBcode stuff (urls, etc). Not sure why, but am looking into it.

3) None of the old posts will have any signature line on them. No way around that.

4) The "last post" listed in the main forum list is wrong. It's the last topic rather than the last reply. This will fix itself as people reply to posts, so I'm not going to worry about it.

I should have all of the forum permissions already set properly. In other words, if you could access the Beta forum or Developer's Forum before, then that should still be true. Developer's Forum is a closed group that I still have to approve. Beta forum is an open group that anyone can join using the Usergroups link at the top of the page.

New features include custom Avatars that you can upload yourself. I've also installed a MOD to the forum that allows us to set an image for a particular group, and I've got a zMUD Guru image set up for the Gurus. The new forum will easily allow additional "Guru" classes in the future, such as Gurus for Zeus or eMobius.

Let me know if you find any problems. I'll be tweaking it some more over the next couple of days. Once it looks like it's working, I'll do the switch over and add the normal Zuggsoft.com header to it so that it will be more seamless for normal users.

Enjoy!

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

It could be nice if the phpBB used another theme. Right now it looks so standard so it isn't like the "zMUD board" but "yet a phpBB" :-)

Sorcerer Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 706 Location: USA

Zugg,
The new forums look great! You are the man!
Are these forums going to replace the ones currently on the zuggsoft site? If so you may want to cross post this on the other boards to get more people to use them.

Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 10:19 pm

Yes, these forums will eventually replace the current ones. But I wanted the "advanced" users in this forum to test it first. I'll post on the main zMUD forum when I'm more comfortable with the look.

Yeah, Rorso, I agree with you on the look being too "standard". I'm not exactly sure what to do about that. I looked through all of the available styles on the phpBB boards and didn't see anything that I liked (in fact, most are *really* ugly).

But since I've started modifying the template files already to shrink the size of the header on top, I think I'm confortable just editing the style manually if I can figure out what I want.

Also, a message to anyone out there with experience with phpBB2. If you know of any MODs or Hacks that I should install to improve the forums, please let me know. I'm open to trying new stuff here.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

I've done a lot of 'tweaking' on phpbb and phpbb2 for various friends. I'm usually added to their administrative staff to go through and fix bugs relating to their board and any mods they've happened to added.

Just email or post any questions/bugs you might have.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

mySQL seems to have died on the phpbb boards.

Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 1:05 am

Yep, I was running the re-index to make the Search function worked and it overloaded the server. I'm going to wait and do the reindexing later tonight.

So, the server is back up and running, but don't be surprised if the Search function doesn't work very well yet.

Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 1:07 am

Oh, and Slicertool, do you know of a good "Quick Reply" MOD? That's the main feature I seem to personally miss in the new forum. I tried looking through the phpBB forums but to be honest, I really hate the search system...it seems to come up with *way* too many matches.

In fact, I'd like to add an option to the Search where it only searches the topic title instead of looking in the message text itself. So, if there is also a mod for that, let me know, otherwise I'll look through the code myself.

My Php and MySql skills are getting pretty good, so I haven't had much of a problem working on this so far. The overall architecture is pretty nice.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Well, the site I was going to recommend ( http://www.phpbbhacks.com ) seems like it is down. When I used to use it, I remember it was a very slow site to begin with, but had a lot of nice mods listed.

edit: Sorry, I take that back, the site is back up =)

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Quick Reply Mod: http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/586

Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 7:38 am

I've done the forum transfer and posted to the main forum page. I've disabled the old forums so that we don't get duplicate posts. If you run into any problems with the new forum, please let me know asap.

The Search function still won't work for a couple of days till I make some improvements.

Sorcerer Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 706 Location: USA

Zugg,
Did you work on the Search Function? I just did a basic search and it worked fine for me.

Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 4:54 pm

I haven't done the full reindex yet. A partial reindex was run yesterday before it crashed. So, some old posts are searchable and some are not. Any new post is automatically added. So, unless something magical happened, the search is probably still not complete.