Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 6:55 pm

OK, Once again I seem to be plagued by crappy software. I can't believe that so many people use phpBB. I'm about to throw this whole thing out the window.

Why am I so pissed you ask?

Well, this crappy forum software just deleted a couple of hundred posts from this eMobius forum. Gone. Totally. It's something to do with their "prunning" "feature" that was turned on by default and the way in which the Snitz forum posts were converted.

I have no idea how much data in other forums have been lost.

This *really* pissed me off because it is very difficult to re-import the old posts once the new forums have already been used. It's going to take me all afternoon to recover from this and this is NOT what I wanted to spend my time working on today.

But forum software should NEVER NEVER NEVER delete posts by default. This is a stupid feature to be enabled by default. And I still have no idea why it just decided to run on the eMobius forum in the first place. What a waste of time this is turning out to be.

(oh, and I didn't even tell you about the 3 hours I wasted last night because I made some changes and it then gave me an "unrecognized { on line 260" error in one of the PHP files. I tried everything to find this unbalanced {. After 3 hours and rewriting the file FROM SCRATCH I learned that it wasn't a bad { after all. It was an extra $ character on line 243 that somehow caused this. So I'm also a bit pissed at PHP today as well. This whole forum conversion has just been a total pain)

Adept Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Posts: 268 Location: Canada

(hug)?

Edit: No one needs insult ontop of injury ;)

(hug)

Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 8:15 pm

Yet more evidence that nobody actually is using this forum code:

If you tell it to only display posts within the past N days (instead of All topics), then it doesn't display the older sticky topics.

STICKY TOPICS SHOULD ALWAYS BE DISPLAYED!

Like I said, I don't think anyone has actually used/tested any of this code.

I hate debugging other people's code.

The good news is that I think I was able to recover the posts that were deleted by the forum. I wrote some custom PHP scripts to go through each record in the old Snitz forum and see if that record existed in the new forum and if not, copy it over. Seems to have worked. At least something is working today.

Oh, I've also been messing with the style to stream line it a bit. I put the Jump to Forum up along the top where I prefer it (I left it at the bottom also). I also got rid of the really annoying button styles so that the normal Windows XP buttons are displayed in the forms. Also doing a bit of tweaking with white space and extra line breaks here and there. Let me know if you see something you don't like.

Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 9:02 pm

OK, I've got the sticky topics always displayed now no matter what time period you have selected to show the forums.

Also, I discovered that the setting for the number of days to show wasn't even saved in your user preferences. So, I added that too. So now if you select "Show topics newer than 7 days" for example, it will save that and remember it for the other forums you visit and for future sessions.

Yet another feature that we had in the old forums that nobody seems to have thought about in the new forums.

Of course, I've got this forum code so customized now that it defeats the entire purpose of using a standard forum code base. Oh well.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

I commiserate with you Zugg. New software is always a pain in the expletive. I liked the old forums, but am very Cool

happy that these provide the same functionality. The added bonus of a better integration to the new bug reporting system should be seen soon. Hopefully it will worth your time spent FIXING these forums.

Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 12:52 am

Yeah, my next waste of time was the 2 hours it took me to get the Zuggsoft menu system to work at the top of the Bug Tracking system. It was doing *really* wierd stuff with the menu creation (showing the menus above the header across the entire width of the screen). The Bug Tracking system has a *very* complex CSS system and I thought the problem was with that. After 2 hours I finally tracked it down to the Document Type that was being sent. For some stupid reason, it was sending a XHTML document type instead of plain HTML even though they don't even use any XHTML features in their code!

Anyway, I've now got the two sides pointing to each other. If you select eMobius from the Product pulldown, you'll be taken to the eMobius site, which looks like the zuggsoft site except the menu bar is blue instead of redish.

From the zuggsoft site, if you select Report Bug, it takes you to the bug tracking system and automatically selects the zMUD product. If you select Report Bug from the eMobius site, it automatically selects the eMobius product (well, Zeus for now).

The menus on each site are a bit different. The eMobius site mentions zMUD, but not other stuff like zMapper or zExplorer. Eventually it will also modify the order of the forum list with the appropriate products on top.

But my next (and hopefully last) job for now is to try and integrate the login database between the forum and the bug tracking system. I want anyone who is already a Beta Tester to be set up in the bug tracking system. Hopefully I'll have that working later tonight.

Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 2:14 am

The Beta forum is now integrated with the Bug Tracking system. You can enter your forum username and password into the Bug Tracking system and it will recognize your access and create a bug tracking user account automatically for you with the same name, password, and email address as used in the beta forum.

You can still create a separate bug tracking account if you wish.

I still need to create the proper beta tester agreement form and developer's agreement form for the new forums, but I'm burned out now, so I'll leave that for another day.

I think I'm done tweaking the forums, web site, and bug tracking system now for a while. Tomorrow I'll be working on database integration in Zeus. Have fun with the new systems. As frustrating as they were to tweak, I think they are probably still an improvement over what we had before.

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

Well, now you've moved a lot of things off of your NT box which has been giving you issues. If nothing else, that will make things a little easier on you.

Hope to see you doing more tweaking on things that will make you money though Twisted Evil

Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 3:47 am

Yeah, me too Wink

The Bug tracker was something I definitely needed to do soon before eMobius gets too far along. The forums came along because it's the same kind of mind-set working on Php scripts. Also, eventually eMobius is going to need this more functional set of forums (and the faster server!)

Just noticed another problem though. If you have it set to only display posts newer than N days, then if someone replies to an old post, it doesn't show up. Looks like it's filtering on the original topic date and not the last-reply date. Yet another example of a feature that nobody has ever tested.

I also just noticed that you can no longer set it from Last N days back to the All Topics setting. That's my fault though, I think.

Anyway, I'll fix those problems tomorrow. Hopefully they will be easy to handle.

Now that I'm a bit more relaxed, I wanted to apologize for my strong language in this post. It's been a frustrating couple of days. I guess my software standards are just a bit higher than a lot of people. I have to remind myself that both the forum software and bug tracking systems were free, and you always get what you pay for.

I *do* want to thank those who helped point me towards both the Mantis system and the phpBB system. In both cases it was still less time consuming than doing it all from scratch myself. The bug tracking system in particular should really pay off when we get deep into eMobius beta testing. It's something people have wanted (including me) for zMUD for many years.

Adept Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Posts: 268 Location: Canada

Cheers on the good work...now back to eMobius so we have something to use all these goodies for ;)

(Just kidding, take some time to breath dude)