Forum software upgrade (for real now)

So we need to be talking about what's gonna happen with the user permissions, right? What are the options there? Should we start discussing them and then make a poll or something?

So just to kind of get our ducks in a row should we make like a quick list of "fix it nowww" stuff and "can be saved for future development" stuff?


User Title/Permissions thing - Possible solution , Flatten the thingy?




Post bit information - I.e. Join date, user title length, aka field etc.

Sig/Avatar dimensions - I know we said smaller, but getting a fixed dimension set in stone would be neat at some point.

Anything else?


edit:


Also haha this formatting is total trash sorry.

Also hope you feel better soon Lex!

So the workflow to me ideally will be like this:

PRIOR TO MOVE

- Sort user (and thread) permissions for smoothest possible transfer

DAY OF MOVE

- Yop performs database transfer (day prior, it takes nearly a day)
- Test user permissions and boards using test accounts.
- Install theme (it's been exported already)
- Install addons (emoji's etc.)
- Remove historic plugins (XF has built in BBCode, ours breaks it)
- Use test accounts to check everything again
- Go live (public access)

ONGOING PROJECTS POST MOVE (can be worked on prior)

- Discuss user titles, postbit info, sig and avatars
- Further custom skinning (replacing "like" button with a monster, easy CSS)
- Feature discussions and request (I strongly think people need to use the board for a while to get used to it so we can all discover what we like and don't like/ what features we want added if any)
- Develop light TLS board theme for those who want it

To address some of the stuff you bring up Gabe:

The avatars have a fixed width over there. We should be able to make them larger if people want to, I'm OK with the size they are now but that needs discussion.

Postbit info: my idea is that rather than having user titles we have small icons, so that if someone is many things (i.e. an SMod and content contributor) they have a small collection of easily identifiable icons rather than text. These will have text on hover, and be VII themed. Just an idea, but it's neater and more visually pleasing than the text jargon we have now. Re: join date and all that, that's totally up for discussion. I'm happy for none of that to be visible, it's cleaner. But we can have polls post-move to decide what we do and don't want, it's all just a switch that can be flipped in the backend.

AKA: This is particularly important for TLS, and I would actually advocate for someone to have an AKA title under their current forum name. So an AKA field that can be enabled or disabled (only disabled for people who don't ever change their usernames, like me) sitting as a subtitle under their forum name. I don't see the need to keep a list of every single username a person has had with this option. All of us kind of have a name they're most known by, and that's the one that should be in the AKA subtitle. So Carlie would have AKA: Carlie under her forum name, and it never changes. You'd have Gabe because that's how we all know you. So on and so forth. I know there are some examples of people who are newer knowing people by other names (i.e. Yop has almost always been Cthulhu here but everyone eventually just calls him Yop because that's how we always refer to him), so he'd be AKA: Yop. I guess it can be whatever someone wants it to be, but IMO one name that's to stay there for good. No real need to list every single previous username in a field. How do we feel about that?

If we can limit the pixel height of sigs I'd like to go for something like 200-300px max, would people be cool with that? Some people have sigs that are the size of a page.

I'd also advocate for enabling custom text styling (i.e. the colour of your post font etc.) because I know people like that, but I don't have any particular horse in that race. LET US OUTLAW THE PINK FONT OF DEATH haha jk

Well look at mr. fancy pants over here and their proper formatting

Postbit info: my idea is that rather than having user titles we have small icons, so that if someone is many things (i.e. an SMod and content contributor) they have a small collection of easily identifiable icons rather than text. These will have text on hover, and be VII themed.

Click to expand...

This is so fucking cool, I'm totally down for something like that!

AKA

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Yup. That's why I made sure to specifically bring it up in that post. When looking for forum upgrade threads I also did a bit of drama thread reading (guilty pleasure lol) and man. Some of the shit that went down because that.. Ooof

I don't expect for petty stuff like that to go down ever again. I hope, but none the less I feel it should still be a thing as well.

I like your approach to it too. It makes sense and the vast majority of us do indeed have that "one username" we all know each other by so it should be ok for the most part. If need be I guess someone could just add more usernames to their sig? lol


Regarding sigs. That sounds like a pretty fair size and since "sigs/tags" are like super 2006 anyway I think as time passes it will be rarer and rarer to find people still into that anyway. I mean heck I love those things and haven't made one in years

That said I also know that resolution offhand and what it looks like just by seeing its dimensions posted and realize others may not be able to visualize that. I don't have time now but when I get home I could make different sized blank "sig" images in those resolutions so people can get an idea for it or something.


edit:

For reference though I'm pretty sure my current sig image is somewhere in the realm of 500x200


edit:

LET US OUTLAW THE PINK FONT OF DEATH haha jk

Click to expand...

Definitely Neon Pink at least


pls

Re: sig size a good reference is mine, which is IMO too large vertically. Currently it's 350px (including the text underneath but not including the edit, quote etc. buttons). We could do something like have a perk of higher postcount be +50px sig size up to a max of 300px, starting at 150px. Vast majority of regular posters here would start at max size obviously because postcount etc. transfers over. Newbies (up to however many we decide posts) have no sig, then can have a 150px sig at 10 posts or something. idk it's all just theory at this stage

I dig all your thoughts/suggestions, Lex

Lex said:

Postbit info: my idea is that rather than having user titles we have small icons, so that if someone is many things (i.e. an SMod and content contributor) they have a small collection of easily identifiable icons rather than text. These will have text on hover, and be VII themed. Just an idea, but it's neater and more visually pleasing than the text jargon we have now. Re: join date and all that, that's totally up for discussion. I'm happy for none of that to be visible, it's cleaner. But we can have polls post-move to decide what we do and don't want, it's all just a switch that can be flipped in the backend.

AKA: This is particularly important for TLS, and I would actually advocate for someone to have an AKA title under their current forum name. So an AKA field that can be enabled or disabled (only disabled for people who don't ever change their usernames, like me) sitting as a subtitle under their forum name. I don't see the need to keep a list of every single username a person has had with this option. All of us kind of have a name they're most known by, and that's the one that should be in the AKA subtitle. So Carlie would have AKA: Carlie under her forum name, and it never changes. You'd have Gabe because that's how we all know you. So on and so forth. I know there are some examples of people who are newer knowing people by other names (i.e. Yop has almost always been Cthulhu here but everyone eventually just calls him Yop because that's how we always refer to him), so he'd be AKA: Yop. I guess it can be whatever someone wants it to be, but IMO one name that's to stay there for good. No real need to list every single previous username in a field. How do we feel about that?

Click to expand...

Postbit: I like this idea.

Aka: Yeah is honestly better that way, I used to have Carlie, my most used username if I wasn't using it and the one I had used before. But now there's just Carlie there, is simpler and it serves its purpose.

FYI, I've split and closed part of the discussion from the past few pages (starting at the staff emeritus discussion); they detract from the main subject of the thread (= moving, etc). I did not handle that situation appropriately, and I apologise for all of it.

Re: steps, Lex's list of tasks and whatnot is pretty much what I've had in mind too. At this point I think most of the work / tasks / etc listed aren't prerequisites to move, e.g. I don't think there's any outstanding blocking issues at this point.

I think a lot of the info currently in the postbit - join date, sex, location to name a few - can just go to the user's profile page, it's not something you need quick access to. I wonder what the history behind that is, I can imagine that a random passer-by would glance at that at least.

Speaking of random passers-by, we'll have to review the permissions of unregistered users as well, like, which sections they can view and what parts of user profiles they can access.

Avatar sizes, we can play with those.

Signature sizes, same. Another dimension for both avatars and signatures we should consider is mobile users. I've had a quick look; at the moment, avatars on Xf look like they're between 2 and 20 KB in size, which is acceptable enough I reckon. The main banner atm is 500 KB and the logo is 122KB, something that we could look into optimizing; switching to JPG might make a lot of difference already. It will be cached for returning users at least.

IIRC custom text styling was a custom modification or a plugin to the site, if it was custom then it'd require template edits which I'm not a fan of, it means having to do a bit of work (re-implement it?) whenever the original template changes. Something to look into.

Re: AKA fields, I think Discourse had an elegant solution for this (but I don't remember if that was discourse or I'm just making shit up here), where as a user you could just pick a "display username", and you could see the original username in the postbit, or switch an option to only show people's original / login names.

So when's the big day?

This depends entirely on Yop. I'm free for the next two weeks because I'm off work with a broken rib. I can pretty much start cleaning stuff up as per The Great Purge after the conclusion of today's vote, shouldn't take me too long. When that's done it's a "whenever" scenario, although the same stipulations apply as before re: me wanting multiple people there to test etc. before we go live.

Lex said:

This depends entirely on Yop.

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Famous last words

Somehow I feel like Lex breaking a rib is like the best thing to happen this summer

(jk you know I don't really mean that babe but yeah)

(also Yop you've done well <3 I know the stuff you've done the last months to not be insignificant work)

Ehhh, Xf is a lot easier than Discourse. I can start the thing next friday or saturday morning I guess, or the weekend after. Or a thursday, whatevz.



I mean <3

lol Yop implementing some test icons

I can do css me!

Lex said:

lol Yop implementing some test icons

Click to expand...

Are they going to be about that size or smaller, do you think?

Smaller. And less square

Also do the title name for alt (and name) so you can see what title it is when hovering

(Ideally they'd be clickable and lead to a page describing the title, but I guess neither vB nor XF has single pages for titles? Just the giant summary one - although I guess they all could be linked to that one just as well.)

Easier for new members etc

We could add that but we'd need to do a template edit then. Which is fine, it's just a pain when Xf updates its own templates

Ah, so adding the icons based on titles is built in. Gotcha.

Could save pain by adding it to a sticky or some shit I guess. I love solving stuff using text workarounds instead of programming haxx

I think text on hover is a must otherwise people will need to learn what the icons mean which is counter intuitive really.

I'm totally late to this. But, I will happily sacrifice any such titles for more Cookie Monster icons. This world just needs more me.

Fangu said:

Ah, so adding the icons based on titles is built in. Gotcha.

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I'm not sure if I understand you properly, but if I do, then no it's not - I had to hack the icons in there manually. You can set a custom CSS class per usergroup though, which is what I used.

And yeah, setting a sticky or some other "source" (like a patch file) will probably be best, that way we can just hit "yeah whatever upgrade". I think I remember that vB offered a diff system for template upgrades back when, but, I still find diffs hard to read so,

Also once we've moved I think we should make a troll cookie monster skin, for the heck of it

Ah. So, I guess an alternative is to add the alt with JS by using the CSS class, if there are easy ways to add custom scrips, that is.