Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

You can override the default style (Fornits) by selecting subSilver in your profile. Then you get the blue/grey when you log in.

this is strange.  i'm on IM with him now.  he can ping this domain, but can't connect with his browser.  is it possible there's some sort of filter in place?

Look, A.T.O.M, I've already said more than once,  I need for him to dupicate this error several times in a row, and since you are in contact with him, it shouldn't be any trouble for you to tell me the EXACT TIME this occurs. It could be any number of things, but without this specific information, there's no way to debug the problem. Anything else is just speculation.

Tech, I have to comment again about the lack of forum organization. I mean come on, The Seed, a long-dead program is at the top while WWASPS, an active and deadly one, is far down the list. I'm usually the last person to suggest this, but can we get some hierarchy here?

Also, we should have a heavily moderated "Emergency Services" forum for people who are in immediate danger of being sent away or who have just had it happen to them and have people trying to get their parents to see the light.

Yeah, I liked the way the most recently posted to forums would rise to the top of the list before. Most of the front end kinda stuff like that is really Ginger's thing. She's been a little busy lately, but she should be back around before long.

And the "Emergency Services" forum sounds like a good idea. Again, Ginger should probably address that. My thing is mostly in dealing with the guts of the system, squashing bugs, etc. Besides, it's still her site.

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
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.

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.

Sounds good... I wonder does this new php software (format) that we are using now (as opposed to the old one) come equipped with the tools necessary to implement these things?

Yeah, it just takes a little hacking. That was the main motivation for the upgrade in the first place. The old board was just that -- old, too old to be compatible with any of the stuff that we needed to set up. But the upgrade added a lot of size to the database from the conversion and the new search tables. There are over 200,000 posts, 3800 registered users, and 25,000 PMs. So, the existing shared server was unable to run the new board. That's why we got a whole new server. This has been in the works for nearly a month, and as you can see, it just went live the other day. Still lots to do... it'll get better.

yeah, I think that may be a little too restrictive

GregFL disabled the bbcode and the html, so you'll have to ask him about that.

And the session cookies are set for 2 hours, the auto-login is set for 1 day. Not sure why you're getting logged out. Maybe those settings need to be tweaked.