Forum Upgrades and Fixes

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Forum Upgrades and Fixes

Postby David Grimes » May 15, 2011 3:15 pm

I am sure many of you have noticed and/or experienced problems with the forum lately. After many years of manually coded updates and numerous hacking/spamming attempts the forum software is not doing so well. I will be installing a fresh copy of the PHPBB software very soon that will remedy most if not all of the problems we have been experiencing.

Here is the catch. We will likely lose some of the less used mods here on the forum. We will probably lose the chatroom which is rarely if ever used. We will also lose the caving news widget on the bottom of the index page. That particular widget severely slows the loading time of the index page and really does not get a lot of attention.

One area in question is the shoutbox, some say to get rid of it others say to keep it. I know the shoutbox does get occasional use so I will leave that up to the members. The current shoutbox we use is completely outdated and no longer supported by the original author and is no longer available for download. This means if we choose to keep the shoutbox we will have to use a different version (not a big deal most are very similar).

I will take input on which mods to keep and which to lose over the next week. If you have a reason we should keep some of these features let em know or if you would like to see something go also let me know.

I would like to perform this update within the next 2 weeks. I will announce the exact date when it is known but Cavechat will likely be down for several hours during the update. After the update we will be implementing several new features on the forum and the Cavechat iPhone app should be ready this summer.
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Re: Forum Upgrades and Fixes

Postby self-deleted_user » May 15, 2011 10:24 pm

Thanks for all your work!!

I do like the shoutbox so that'd be cool to keep =)

As far as mods...iirc youtube and googlevideo are not standard and at least the youtube one I have used. Another nice one is spoilers, which if posting trip reports with lots of images or something like that, you can toss images in spoilers, making pages load better/faster since a "recent posts" or something won't keep getting bumped as images load with the scrolling. Not sure if that's as much an issue here or not. I dunno, I like spoiler usage.

And it would be nice to be a bit more lenient on the avatar sizing (maybe up to 15 kb? and 123px x 150px, although I think that is standard settings on phpbb3 so a fresh load probably does that automatically)

uh yeah...so really not many suggestions I guess, haha. OOOH please keep the smilies, I like the caving smilies :D I know they are (or at least were) a pita to add (I never figured out batch add for smilies had to do 'em one at a time over on a rabbit forum) but they are so adorkable! :D

Thanks! If I can be of any help lmk, I know it takes a lot of time running these things. :)

ETA: oh and iirc there is an option in the backend to enable prosilver_left. I think it was just a simple enable button, I think it loads the codes for that automatically, but that'd be nice to enable. I could be missremembering on that though. It's been a bit.
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Re: Forum Upgrades and Fixes

Postby David Grimes » May 17, 2011 4:00 pm

I will look into changing the avatar sizes but it should not be a problem. As for the shoutbox I am looking into mchat, it is the newest and most up to date chat box for phpbb. It also offers some cool features that our shoutbox currently does not offer. I have already started putting together the updated forum and have added many mods already. As for the smilies we will have all the smilies we have now since all I need to to do is upload the folder. All of our current graphics will be the same. We will also be adding a mobile version of the forum so you will not have to own an iphone to use a mobile version. This feature will take a little longer since it may create problems since PHPBB 3.0.9 is supposed to have a mobile layout built in.

Currently the date for the upgrade is set for 05/29/2011 probably in the morning still could change because I am leaving for Florida on the 30th.
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Re: Forum Upgrades and Fixes

Postby self-deleted_user » May 17, 2011 6:47 pm

I've used cavechat on my Android based phone and it looks fine on that :)
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Re: Forum Upgrades and Fixes

Postby David Grimes » May 17, 2011 6:58 pm

The mobile version would primarily make loading times faster and reduce data usage for users who may not have unlimited data. Currently Cavechat has a lot of images that load with it using a lot of unnecessary data. Also there are small issues with different phones including smartphones that affect functionality. For instance most of the administration panel does not function correctly on a Blackberry as well as posting. The mobile version will simply use less of the users allotted monthly data and help make the functionality more phone friendly.

As for the Cavechat App, an iPhone app for a website is basically a mobile friendly version as well but the app will have more functionality then the plain mobile version and a different look and feel. The main point of an app for a website is just a quick convenient way to access your favorite websites from your phone or other similar device.
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Re: Forum Upgrades and Fixes

Postby self-deleted_user » May 17, 2011 7:57 pm

Oh nice! I am new to mobile Internet usage and such haha. Just got a smart phone about a week ago because I wanted to have gps and play angry birds >_> great reasons, right? haha
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