The New Forums

[NeXT]

I can at least attest to the new forum certainly keeping me away. The moderation team is still doing a fantastic job but site administration's a bunch of clowns. It's been almost a month since the update and aside from a few immediate fixes and adjustments nothing much else has changed.

-PM's are still broken
-Padding is still an issue
-Avatars were broken/lost
-Navigation is in many places still a mystery
-Member locations still don't work
-We've had a site-wide outage resulting in a loss of data ON A CLOUD SERVICE
-An uptick in spam

So far it's been who, Erik specifically who has been mouth piecing what's going on behind the scenes while the server shoulders away? I can see why MaxTheRabbit, tipc and others who wish not to be named have some really venomous things to say (I'm not even anonymously quoting them because they're mean and directly attack several people by name) about how badly this has dragged out with absolutely no admission that yes, the upgrade was not tested at all. It was thrown at the database and people hoped it would stick. It didn't and now you got a mess that's even less appealing than the likes of Discord servers that have been sucking up all the talent into an unarchivable void.

Do you want another forum that evaporates into Discord? This is how you do it.

 

[Agent Orange]

My personal feelings for what there worth, is that it's time to kiss and make up. I would like to make a plea to Erik to please reinstate MaxTheRabbit and TIPC. Sure, tempers may have been running high, but those two individuals will be sorely missed here on the forum.

 

[VERAULT]

I agree. With the Caveat they apologize for words said. We all say things we don't mean but must own up to them as well. This got hostile.. Hostility still reaks in the air. Lets bury some hatchets and get this place back like it used to be.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

So, I will add that I was particularly sad to see MaxTheRabbit get ban-hammered, as he's generally been a really high-quality contributor, and would like to vainly hope that there might be some room for reconciliation. I kind of feel like beyond that I sort of have to hold my tongue because, well, as much as I understand the anger at the (admittedly really rough) rollout, the navigation and UI changes, and the ongoing bugs I also understand why in the thick of the unproductive and overheated conversations that ensued certain actions may have seemed necessary.

Clearly there is still stuff broken and I get why it's ticking people off, but I'm also not going to call anyone a "clown" unless I actually have direct evidence that they've earned the label, and the fact is I have no idea how much of this is the site administrators "not doing the needful" verses it being exactly the sort of unpredictable fallout that happens when you're forced to upgrade something as grossly out of date as this forum's software was. I've been through more than a few forum software upgrade/migrations before, the sad fact is they *never* go smoothly and, of course, if you're on a tech forum *everyone* is going to have an opinion about how not only you did it wrong because (you picked the wrong software/didn't test it enough/clicked the wrong box/just generally suck) the entire software industry is circling the drain because of javascript this and SSL that and why do we need that and IT'S YOUR FAULT NOW I HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT INVADING MY SAFE SPACE WHY CAN'T I HAVE 1995 BACK?!

So far as I know it isn't anyone's full-time paid job to put up with this abuse, so, yeah, while "kiss and make up" might be a bit too much to ask I would hope that maybe we could all collectively be as patient and understanding as reasonably possible.

 

[vwestlife]

C'mon, admins! This is just shoddy. The end user should not be seeing this -- unless you want to actually give us admin privileges, so then maybe we could fix some of the problems on our own.

 

[Agent Orange]

Max T. Rabbit reached out to me on another forum and asked that I tell everyone he said goodbye. Especially a few people "Chuck G., Agent Orange, Eudimorphodon, Dwight Elvey, modem7 - it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I regret not being able to interact with you further here"

vol.2:
If you will, please contact Max and tell him not to get too far away as he has a lot of support on this forum, and things will get worked out. Everything seems slow here when trying to contact the mods and other powers that be.

Tom

 

[amd]

Basically, for the PM - the deal is:

The text content is -NOT- being displayed on the receiving end. I can see all the text I sent on mine, but any replies are blank.
***BUT***
The text content *IS* coming with the email notifications, e.g. you can read the reply via email, and send a reply using the PM function - the receiver will get the text in the email notice.

OR you use the PM function and attach a graphic ..and then the receiver can view the attachment.
(and at the moment the attachments are just sitting and spinning, not loading, when you "click to enlarge". But if you right click on the thumbnail, view graphic in a new tab, and then go to the URL and remove the &thumb thing at the end then reload. It will show you the proper size.

PM'ing via File Attachment:


But now it seems that from this point:


All I'm getting is the "blue cylon" (Loading ...)

..and the graphic never loads.

So viewing the image directly, Open Image in New Tab:


..and then edit the URL by removing "&type=thumb" from the end;




..and now it will load the full size attachment.

(and it will still show 0 views when reload the PM and hover over the thumbnail)

This is so much fun.

 

[Chuck(G)]

The difference appears to be that you're a new user. Old users apparently don't have such problems.

 

[Robbbert]

amd can you send me a test PM with just text? I want to look in the source and find out if it's just hidden in some fashion, or not there at all. Or if it depends on the browser.

Thanks.

 

[VERAULT]

AMD, I sent you the same screenshot twice yesterday. When I looked this morning it was gone again and I sent it again this morning. Did you receive anything from me today?

 

[Erik]

I can at least attest to the new forum certainly keeping me away. The moderation team is still doing a fantastic job but site administration's a bunch of clowns. It's been almost a month since the update and aside from a few immediate fixes and adjustments nothing much else has changed.

-PM's are still broken
-Padding is still an issue
-Avatars were broken/lost
-Navigation is in many places still a mystery
-Member locations still don't work
-We've had a site-wide outage resulting in a loss of data ON A CLOUD SERVICE
-An uptick in spam

So far it's been who, Erik specifically who has been mouth piecing what's going on behind the scenes while the server shoulders away? I can see why MaxTheRabbit, tipc and others who wish not to be named have some really venomous things to say (I'm not even anonymously quoting them because they're mean and directly attack several people by name) about how badly this has dragged out with absolutely no admission that yes, the upgrade was not tested at all. It was thrown at the database and people hoped it would stick. It didn't and now you got a mess that's even less appealing than the likes of Discord servers that have been sucking up all the talent into an unarchivable void.

Do you want another forum that evaporates into Discord? This is how you do it.

I'm sorry to see that you are dissatisfied with our migration and efforts.

The reality is that the new version of vBulletin is doing fine in most regards with only one or two real issues from your list.

I understand that PMs are still broken for some. I just don't know how or why. I've tested the PM system across a few machines and several (modern) browsers and it has worked for me every time.

If someone can give me specifics as to what isn't working and the configuration it's failing in I can do some research. If it's your Windows 3.1 system running IE 2 then I'm not going to be able to help.

The "padding" issue is an opinion, not a bug. There are ways to adjust your personal view into the forum and there are vBulletin styles that might align better with your taste. I'm not actively looking for those in my limited spare time, but if you point me at them I'll certainly consider incorporating them. Here is a good place to start the search...

Avatars were indeed broken. I forgot to re-import them. Someone mentioned it and I did so. Problem solved, I hope.

Navigation on the old forums was a mystery when I upgraded from 2.x. It was a mystery in vBulletin when I migrated from PHPbb. The controls on my Android phone were a mystery when I upgraded from my Nokia. That's the way technology evolves, unfortunately (or fortunately.) It hasn't taken me that long to adapt to the new layouts and new workflows.

I'm not sure what you mean by member locations. I suspect that it's a part of the above. If you click on a members name or avatar you go to a member info screen and their location is there, plain as day. You are listed as "Location: Kamloops, BC, Canada"

Or are you talking about something else entirely?

We did have a sitewide outage. There should not have been data loss, but we may have erroneously restored an older database backup over the active one. The restore was done when the site was believed to be down but if we did lose anything it was only a short period of time's worth... Apologies for that if it happened.

BTW, we aren't 100% sure of the cause of that outage but it may have been a result of weekly maintenance. If so it may happen again, but we'll be tracking it so it won't be for as long and we won't be guessing at what's up quite as much...

The uptick in SPAM was also do to a missed setting - one of our anti-SPAM measures (requiring moderation for new members for a time - something else that I get a lot of flack for) was reverted to default by the upgrade. That was quickly fixed.

As for testing, we absolutely did migrate the site as a test a couple of weeks before the final migration. I exercised the new forums as did several other members. They worked well. We missed the avatars issue but what we really caught was the fact that the UI upgrade was significant enough that a small portion of our membership, as always, would reel at the shock of it.

We accepted that risk as a tradeoff for a more modern, more stable, more secure and more flexible version of our preferred software.

You, and the others you named, did not come as a surprise.

Hopefully you (and the rest) will keep using the new forums and will get used to the changes.

If not, I totally understand.

And, for the record, I think of myself as more of a Krusty than a Bozo...

 

[jafir]

I posted screen shots of my PM issue on a new thread, as I was asked to do, and no one did anything. I’m not sure what other ways we can communicate that things aren’t working.

It gives an error that I’m not allowed to view my own messages page.

 

[vwestlife]

I'm not sure what you mean by member locations. I suspect that it's a part of the above. If you click on a members name or avatar you go to a member info screen and their location is there, plain as day. You are listed as "Location: Kamloops, BC, Canada"

Or are you talking about something else entirely?

Remove the useless "reputation bar" from the sidebar of each post and replace it with the user's location, so we don't have to go hunting for it in their profile if they post something location-specific and we want to know where in the world they are. That's what we're asking for.

And seeing this on the main forum page can't help but give people the impression that a slipshod job of the forum conversion was done...

 

[Eudimorphodon]

It gives an error that I’m not allowed to view my own messages page.

FWIW I've been seeing the occasional weird "access denied" errors in the forum views. Other day, for instance, someone posted a new topic in the Tandy section (it's the one about keyboard pad replacements) but when I clicked on it from the "new topics" list I was told I didn't have permission to view it. Just for laughs, though, I tried hitting it from another browser where I wasn't logged in, and as an anonymous user it worked. Interestingly, though, after I replied to a different topic in that forum it let me in via the new-topics link. I don't know if an admin had fixed something in the intervening time, but it was, well, weird.

 

[whartung]

The "padding" issue is an opinion, not a bug. There are ways to adjust your personal view into the forum and there are vBulletin styles that might align better with your taste. I'm not actively looking for those in my limited spare time, but if you point me at them I'll certainly consider incorporating them. Here is a good place to start the search...

If you have several short messages, or wide screens (same thing), the while the space is an opinion, it doesn't mean it's not an issue. And there's only so much theming (which I assume is just a local CSS file) can achieve, in that it can't readily actually relocate things.

There's are 7 elements stacked vertically in the identity section: avatar, name, member status, rep bar, join date, posts, and the "on line" pip at the bottom. The message also includes the quote/flag/like footer on each message.

I think someone would have to show a screen shot of what the old forum looked like.

On another forum, the identity part was on top of the text and across the page. It included all of the same elements, but vertically was no bigger than the avatar.

On short message, the identity box dominates the layout.

I don't know if a theme can change any of that.

The red box, made manifest by the identity fields, is what I think folks are talking about.

 

[amd]

Robbbert You ASCII'ed and should have now received. The real question is - have the gnomes under the software bridge allowed it to pass?

 

[tingo]

By the way, happy birthday!

Thank you! (Yeah, I know it wasn't directed at me, but since my birthday is April 27th, it felt appropriate to answer this.)

 

[Robbbert]

amd your message was received, no problem.

I wonder if some other people have too much in their Inbox, or using an old browser that doesn't support the javascript in use. Some browsers allow you to see if javascript errors occurred - maybe see if that reveals anything.


Also, I thought I'd see what happens on my other browser, Internet Explorer 11. Unfortunately it isn't possible to log in, the "Login" button doing nothing. I would have thought that would have worked.

Oh, I have another browser, Microsoft Edge, I keep forgetting it's there. I was able to log in and view the message with it.

 

[VERAULT]

No Doesnt matter which browser I use I still cant see the messages nor can the other person. And quite frankly if we had to use a specific browser just to use this website,, that would be complete BS!

 

[NeXT]

I think someone would have to show a screen shot of what the old forum looked like.

Us old salts remember the OLD forum before the merge with the Vintage Computer Federation and it was still Erik's World. The color style was the default but that was fine. Here it was in 2010.

After the merger I seem to recall there was briefly a bit of chaos as the forum received a software update, but for the most part the layout and styles were able to be imported over and everything was fine. I don't care for the color theme but things remained the same. Note that there is no padding and I'm using a 1050p display.

Now navigate around the forum and the changes are pretty drastic. If I'm running a browser on a machine with a 4:3 resolution like 1280x1024 there's no padding but as you stretch out on a widescreen it appears as the forum eventually stops reforming to fill out all available space.