Fornits

Announcements & Tech Support => Web forum hosting => Topic started by: Antigen on July 14, 2006, 04:41:41 AM

Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Antigen on July 14, 2006, 04:41:41 AM
Ok, folks, what do you think so far?
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Anonymous on July 14, 2006, 09:19:27 AM
I like it alright; but this ~newest look you've changed to today seems a bit 'scattered' ...hard to explain... Froderik
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Anonymous on July 14, 2006, 09:20:19 AM
Yeah, there's not enough separation -- hard to tell whose post is whose.. (me again, Frod)
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Anonymous on July 14, 2006, 10:46:09 AM
If it's gonna look like this it might as well go back to the old way. My .02
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Deborah on July 14, 2006, 11:38:42 AM
I'm confused. When I open Fornits from a bookmark I get a page with gold banners (headers, whatever they're called) with a bugandy colored font.
After I log in it goes back to the blue with black font.

I don't like the burgandy font- too light, hard to read. I agree with the previous poster, the gold/burgandy format is too run together. The lines seperating posts are too light in color.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Antigen on July 14, 2006, 01:15:50 PM
I set the default theme to the new one I'm working on. When you're logged in, you have it set to subSilver, which is the default that it came with out of the box.

You're right, Frod. I just have to tweak and play a bit more to get those header rows showing how I want them to. There's also an extra one sided border on some of the headers. I don't like that!! I'll get to it when I can, though.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: tommyfromhyde1 on July 14, 2006, 01:56:23 PM
I miss the random quotations. Ya had a cool collection of those. :smokin:
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Deborah on July 14, 2006, 03:40:45 PM
yeh, and "who's online" and that the forums on the index aren't bumped up when a post is made to them. search times out too quickly- execute a search, read one of the posts that is returned, go back to the list of returns and that page has "timed out". re-enter search criteria... and repeat.
lots of changes. i guess we'll adjust.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: try another castle on July 14, 2006, 04:54:16 PM
There are some pros and cons.

pro: you can upload your own pic
con: stricter character limit for username
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: TechJockey on July 14, 2006, 05:17:58 PM
Deborah, thanks for all your feedback. That's a vital part of working out the bugs. The timeout could have been a result of an apache restart. There's going to be a few burps here and there. But, the upgrade was absolutely necessary for a lot of reasons.

And the limit on the length of usernames (25 chars) is hardcoded into phpbb. Not alot that can be done about that, short of modifying the actual code. Too many modifications to the core stuff is just going to open up a can of worms, and make it a real pain to add security patches/bug fixes in the future, as they are released by the developers.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Anonymous on July 14, 2006, 07:21:09 PM
Not that big a deal.

I'd recommend you reorganize the forum though. The forum list being modified to put the last-posted forum was a very nice feature. Right now it's just chaos. Why not organize it with the main Troubled Teen and new Info Forums on top, then a list of the current programs, then the defunct ones?

And for the love of Satan turn the BBCode back on.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: TechJockey on July 14, 2006, 07:31:32 PM
Quote from: ""Milk Gargling Death Penal""
And for the love of Satan turn the BBCode back on.


It is on. You might want to check the preferences in your profile.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Deborah on July 15, 2006, 09:55:19 AM
Hey TJ,
Your welcome. And don't take my "bitchin" personally. I'll live with the changes because they appear to have been necessary, but 'so far' it does seem that the software is inferior to the old in several ways, particularly in terms of ease of discussion.
Another problem I discovered this morning. If you click a link in a message for an old Forntis post, like this one:
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... t=40#60164 (http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?topic=6481&forum=11&start=40#60164)
it takes you to the forum index.
This makes many of the old posts pretty useless, as people often linked to the answer to something, rather than repeat it.
Will that ever change, or is that feature gone forever?
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: TechJockey on July 15, 2006, 02:54:19 PM
Quote from: ""Deborah""
Hey TJ,
Your welcome. And don't take my "bitchin" personally. I'll live with the changes because they appear to have been necessary, but 'so far' it does seem that the software is inferior to the old in several ways, particularly in terms of ease of discussion.
Another problem I discovered this morning. If you click a link in a message for an old Forntis post, like this one:
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... t=40#60164 (http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?topic=6481&forum=11&start=40#60164)
it takes you to the forum index.
This makes many of the old posts pretty useless, as people often linked to the answer to something, rather than repeat it.
Will that ever change, or is that feature gone forever?


Well, I know what you mean, when you say "inferior". But I think a more accurate term to use would be "immature". PhpBB2 was total rewrite, from the ground up. The old version had so many security weaknesses in it, rather than just fixing them, the developers decided to just start over from scratch. There was one issue a while back, where phpbb was actually used to spread a virus.

This is only version 2.0.21, so really, it's more like a version 1.0.21. There are a lot of imporovements and feature enhancements, but there are also still quite a few bugs. Also, Ginger had been hacking and modifying the old board for about 5 years, so she had cutomized a lot of things, and those modifications were totally lost.

But no, nothing is lost forever, it's just going to take some time, and hopefully, things will eventually be even better than before. I'd really love to get directly involved with some of the development of the software itself, because I can see lots of things that need work, and there are a lot of features that could be added. But, right now, we're really busy, mostly with the things going on behind the scenes, related to the underlying systems that make everything work. I was fortunate to have enough free time lately, that I've been able to do pretty much nothing else except this for the past month or so.

I am aware of the issue with the old links, and I do think that's something else that is fixable. The variable names in the query strings have changed, so any links from the old board will just return a 404, File Not Found error. I just set things up to redirect those back to the main index, for now.

Anyway, like I said, it will take some time, probably not just days or weeks. But things will definitely get better.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: A.T.O.M. on July 15, 2006, 03:29:32 PM
Quote from: ""Deborah""
I'm confused. When I open Fornits from a bookmark I get a page with gold banners (headers, whatever they're called) with a bugandy colored font.
After I log in it goes back to the blue with black font.

delete your old bookmark and create a new one, empty your cache
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: A.T.O.M. on July 15, 2006, 03:37:09 PM
Quote from: ""Eudora""
I set the default theme to the new one I'm working on.

Don't know how familiar your are with phpBB, but changing the theme to anything other than default can be a hassle when installing MOD's and, by itself, phpBB lacks some popular features. It's the MOD's that provide a lot of the good functionality. BUT - you may want to consider upgrading to phpBB 3 before installing any MOD's, as it has more functionality built in:
http://www.phpbb.com/development/ (http://www.phpbb.com/development/)
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Anonymous on December 23, 2006, 08:51:34 PM
Quote from: ""TechJockey""
Quote from: ""Deborah""
Hey TJ,
Your welcome. And don't take my "bitchin" personally. I'll live with the changes because they appear to have been necessary, but 'so far' it does seem that the software is inferior to the old in several ways, particularly in terms of ease of discussion.
Another problem I discovered this morning. If you click a link in a message for an old Forntis post, like this one:
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... t=40#60164 (http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?topic=6481&forum=11&start=40#60164)
it takes you to the forum index.
This makes many of the old posts pretty useless, as people often linked to the answer to something, rather than repeat it.
Will that ever change, or is that feature gone forever?

Well, I know what you mean, when you say "inferior". But I think a more accurate term to use would be "immature". PhpBB2 was total rewrite, from the ground up. The old version had so many security weaknesses in it, rather than just fixing them, the developers decided to just start over from scratch. There was one issue a while back, where phpbb was actually used to spread a virus.

This is only version 2.0.21, so really, it's more like a version 1.0.21. There are a lot of imporovements and feature enhancements, but there are also still quite a few bugs. Also, Ginger had been hacking and modifying the old board for about 5 years, so she had cutomized a lot of things, and those modifications were totally lost.

But no, nothing is lost forever, it's just going to take some time, and hopefully, things will eventually be even better than before. I'd really love to get directly involved with some of the development of the software itself, because I can see lots of things that need work, and there are a lot of features that could be added. But, right now, we're really busy, mostly with the things going on behind the scenes, related to the underlying systems that make everything work. I was fortunate to have enough free time lately, that I've been able to do pretty much nothing else except this for the past month or so.

I am aware of the issue with the old links, and I do think that's something else that is fixable. The variable names in the query strings have changed, so any links from the old board will just return a 404, File Not Found error. I just set things up to redirect those back to the main index, for now.

Anyway, like I said, it will take some time, probably not just days or weeks. But things will definitely get better.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Anonymous on December 23, 2006, 08:53:57 PM
ok thats weird when i typed in fornits at google it took me straight here- to one of these post reply boxes with some eles' reply allready written in it
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Anonymous on December 24, 2006, 11:02:55 AM
Google isn't smart enough not to click the Post Reply button to get its results.
Title: What do you think of the software upgrade?
Post by: Deborah on December 24, 2006, 10:39:37 PM
Quote from: ""Guest""
ok thats weird when i typed in fornits at google it took me straight here- to one of these post reply boxes with some eles' reply allready written in it


yeh, i've had that happen a couple of times since the change.