Forum software upgrade (for real now)

[Cthulhu]

So! I'll do a bit moar research into Xf this weekend, see if there's a free trial or demo environment. If I don't see anything majorly sucky, I'll get a license and see if I can install it.

I don't know if there's any majority consensus one way or another, but so far things seem pretty neutral / in favor of Xf and not too excited about Discourse. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Lex]

Fair enough, I'll transfer the money directly to Yop in that case. I've done this in the past because I don't believe in Paypal

 

[Cthulhu]

I like to think on the one hand that there won't be as many er, conversion costs and such involved if using Paypal, but OTOH IIRC Paypal will charge a fee for every transfer or purchase made through it so fuck knows

I also take beer.

TY <3. I'll try a demo to check for any fuckery, then get the license. Faux edit: demo environment at http://63e659463d90c998.demo-xenforo.com/204/index.php.

edit: first impressions, it's pretty good.

 

[Lestat]

Nice it even has Reddit tie ins

 

[Mage]

I like to think on the one hand that there won't be as many er, conversion costs and such involved if using Paypal, but OTOH IIRC Paypal will charge a fee for every transfer or purchase made through it so fuck knows

I also take beer.

TY <3. I'll try a demo to check for any fuckery, then get the license. Faux edit: demo environment at http://63e659463d90c998.demo-xenforo.com/204/index.php.

edit: first impressions, it's pretty good.

You can gift money via PayPal, there's still fees for currency conversions afaik.

@ demo: JFC you are a fourteen-year old at heart.

 

[Cthulhu]

This has been public knowledge for a while now

 

[Cthulhu]

I'm going to buy a license and do a test install / import nao, fgj.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

X

 

[Cthulhu]

Ok it took about err... 15 hours? ish? Give or take? First impressions are good; I'm having people do a quick check (to make sure private stuff is private) and then have others take a look.

It doesn't import smileys by default, but generates an .xml file that I can later import. The interface kinda froze when I tried that, . We'll probably need to sort those (and usergroups, etc) out before moving for real.

Some observations:

* No need for a password reset; seems to work with the existing vB passwords. It's not a very complicated password encoding scheme, mind you.
* It feels fast, and has some animations and such too.
* Penis

 

[Lex]

I have excellent news - I should be able to skin the entire board myself, Xen has some nice customisation options. I've already started tinkering, will keep to the default TLS colour scheme as much as possible.

 

[Cthulhu]

I can report that Xf so far is slowly making my dick rock hard.

 

[Lex]

Honestly it's so easy to customise I'd say we can open for a beta at the weekend tbh. Just give me a few more days to tinker with it after work and fix things to our liking. We keep going like this and we can go live in less than two weeks.

 

[Lulcielid]

Just a small question, what will be the new rules and limitations for avatar and signature that you mentioned a few pages ago, yet?

 

[Claymore]

I can't express into words how excited I am that this is happening.

 

[Teioh]

I think I mentioned it before about coming from a xenforo forum to TLS and how much I liked how easy that transition was for me. Really happy that you've chosen to go in this direction

 

[Lex]

Just a small question, what will be the new rules and limitations for avatar and signature that you mentioned a few pages ago, yet?

This is something we can discuss but I intend to set a vertical pixel limit to signature sizes because some of them just got ridiculous and added crazy amounts of clutter. Mine is too big for example, in terms of verticality. Yours as it stands would be fine. Teioh above me is about perfect.

Avatar sizes on the current Xen theme are limited to about the size of Yop's but can be adjusted.

 

[Lex]

I made some additional tweaks to the styling today, need some modules installed which require customer access on the Xen forums, Yop can add my email to his account there to get that access according to their website so I've requested that

A few people have been given access now and are providing good feedback for me to work from. In terms of styling we can actually roll with what we have now but there's more I want to do for the default TLS style.

We've also hit a few snags with user and board permissions in part because we have some boards with crazy permissions here and we also have too many user roles, so we'll be consolidating/ flattening those out before going live. Too many boards with custom permissions which just didn't really translate well to XF.

A bunch of the admin work has to be done post transition just because we can't make changes here that aren't necessarily going to translate with an update to the XF software. One such snag is that the current user ladder and permissions based on post count doesn't transfer over meaning even though Site Director has admin permissions my initial posts on the board required moderator approval lol. Before anyone panics it keeps the post count, just not the associated user title and permission (i.e. Great Old One). All of that can be rebuilt in XF but I think we prefer the cleaner look of no user titles so far aside from the essentials. Might look to implementing small icons under the avatar and disabling custom user titles or at least limiting the character count.

Anyway more to be done tomorrow

Those who have access are free to share screenshots, I'm heading to bed at the minute but it functions really well on mobile also so I'm super pleased with how it's going so far.

 

[Geostigma]

Might look to implementing small icons under the avatar and disabling custom user titles or at least limiting the character count.

Hmmm. Hmmm.

It's been a treat to try and break the new forum for the last 2 hours or so. Thankfully it seems Xen is holding up quite well and aside from the permissions/ranks/approvals snaffu everythings going so smooth so far

Can't wait to see how it looks once you get access to the xen support site to add more stuff

 

[Cthulhu]

Do try and add as little as possible, we don't need all the features right away, .

At least we're on Xf 2, which is relatively new and a lot of the older addons don't work right on there. I just hope they're not doing themselves a footgun by going ahead with a big change like that - that's what caused the pain in vB too.

I'm also glad we don't need to do as many template changes, that was kind of a pain back when our version of vB was still getting updates.

 

[Lex]

OPEN BETA TIME

I'll make a new thread to grab peoples's attention but yeah if people could log in using their TLS username and password to start poking around that would be great.

Biggest issues to resolve so far for going live:

- User permissions. Nearly every post needed mod approval, I have removed this for any user with the primary usergroup "registered user", "super moderator" and obviously, Administrator (even Yop's posts needed mod approval yesterday, weird shit). I've already explained this above. So far I've given "can post without mod approval" to the majority of usergroups, but this is something that'll need to be fixed BEFORE the move, and it's time consuming. Essentially I'll be making everyone a generic usergroup and then adjusting permissions after the move (so Admin - Mod - User). We'll then need to establish a new ladder. I have all this written down.

- The issue is essentially that some of our boards have bespoke permissions (specific usergroups have access to specific boards) and not all of that translates well but for the most part it's OK, it's just a tickbox exercise and RSI prone activity for the mods and admins post move

- The styling is basically done for default but obviously criticism will be accepted. Keep in mind it's not going to look absolutely amazing because I've been building/ tweaking it at nights with some custom CSS and some Yop (thank you so much darling), but it's better to be functional. We can build additional custom styles in future which can be switched on the fly.

- Be forthcoming with suggestions and I'll make a survey to prioritise what we want changed/ added etc.


GO TEST

 

[Mage]

RE: shit like user titles, isn't that the sort of thing that needs to be thrown out to consensus rather than one or two persons making calls? I can kind of understand signatures being restricted but the one thing that happens that annoys fuck out of me is when one post stretches the border so the page loads weird to accommodate it. Is there a way of preventing that on XF?

 

[Lex]

I made all the site staff user titles and they need updated/ overhauled anyway, that's the main thing causing the issue. Shit like "Site Author" etc became people's primary usergroup just for display and they don't have any permissions when transferred because posting permissions on this board are based on the post count ladder which doesn't exist on XF (i.e. legendary member etc).

Certainly if people want like "Donator" and stuff still that's fine but it'll need to be created after the transfer and if we don't do the thing I suggested and flatten them all before the transfer then the site will be down for like a month while me and whoever else has the will (probably X lol) manually click permissions and triple check each user title using test accounts. We'll be doing that kind of thing anyway but it's already time consuming to manually check the privacy using test accounts for a few basic usergroups.

I can kind of understand signatures being restricted but the one thing that happens that annoys fuck out of me is when one post stretches the border so the page loads weird to accommodate it. Is there a way of preventing that on XF?

It's a built in feature already

 

[Geostigma]

RE: shit like user titles, isn't that the sort of thing that needs to be thrown out to consensus rather than one or two persons making calls? I can kind of understand signatures being restricted but the one thing that happens that annoys fuck out of me is when one post stretches the border so the page loads weird to accommodate it. Is there a way of preventing that on XF?

If you look at my screen cap in the previous page it should show that it just makes a new line for exceedingly long user titles instead of keeping it one line and stretching the post bit.

Regarding throwing it out though, I think the reasoning is that currently the sleek and minimalist approach looks pretty neat and user titles would fuck with that or something

If you look at the username/avatar section on posts currently it's only just that basically. No join date, age, sex etc.

 

[Lex]

^we can easily put in that info if people want it. It's just a checkbox in the backend but it does look a little messier.

 

[Geostigma]

^we can easily put in that info if people want it. It's just a checkbox in the backend but it does look a little messier.

Yeah i think it would look better without tbh, the only thing I could think of that would be actually important would be the AKA field, though we could just have people do that in Sigs instead?