Forum software upgrade (for real now)

Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Righto, I'm going to do a fiddle today; I'm going to chuck the test site behind a password because when I tried an import locally, non-public sites appeared in public and such.

Because I like to ramble while doing shit from time to time, I'll start a channel on Discord; general forum related questions and requests and shit can go there too.

Also I think we'll need to start referring to the things as "chat" and "forums", because the geniuses that called the one Discourse and the other Discord need a punch in the dick :awesome:
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
I'm currently (as I rambled about in #forums) running an import the regular, slow way; looks like it'll take about 25-30 hours. What I plan to do is to put a bit notice on the forums once we've started the move saying "yo dawg anything you post will not be transferred".

I also found a way to have the old forum links redirect to the new one: https://meta.discourse.org/t/redirect-vbulletin-urls-to-discourse-urls/47394

I do plan to keep the old forums around in archive mode, probably under a different address though (and with rules saying search engines aren't allowed to index it).

If all goes well, I think I should just go ahead and do the move in the last week of the year (so err, in about two weeks?), I've got a couple days off then. Then again, not that many, I've got err... actually just the 28th and 29th available, maybe part of the 27th depending on what time I go home. Might not be enough, I expect to need at least two or three days to set up the new forums, move posts, sort out posts and usergroups / access rights, and then gradually have people join - staff first so they can make sure there's no private threads publicly viewable, then some beta testers. All the while configuring, fixing and tweaking the thing.

Might be wiser to do it when I have more time. Or I should take the whole first week of the new year off too.
 
Flintlock

Flintlock

Pro Adventurer
Let's take our time with this. I know we already have, hurr, but most of that time has been spent doing nothing. Let's not rush the time we spend doing something. I think people should be given an opportunity to poke around Discourse and raise any potential issues once this import has completed before we settle on a cut-off date.

Personally speaking, I still have a fair amount of work to do on the theme. I can probably get some work done over Christmas but it may take until the new year, after I've moved to a new apartment, before I can really get it to where I want it to be.
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Yeah sure thing; I've got the importer running and I'll see if I can organize things locally, then create a backup there and install it in the test server, that way people can play with it in a way that is more like the real thing.

Free shitpoasting for everyone :monster:
 
Mage

Mage

She/They
AKA
Mage
Okay I have a guilty confession: I got an email about the update and deleted it by accident. What did it say?
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
O rly? I / we didn't send out an email o_O

What was the subject? Where was it from? Remember anything like that?
 
ForceStealer

ForceStealer

Double Growth
When we first put the Discourse site up I would get periodic "report" emails. And I got another one on Monday, informing me that Yop had posted 'since my last visit.'

2YMfpkx.jpg
 
Mage

Mage

She/They
AKA
Mage
Ah, that might well have been it but I didn't check the contents before it got binned. Okay I'm relieved now.
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
The default email settings may need a bit of tweaking, :monster:. I mean I'm fine if people like to get e-mail updates from the thing but I for one would rather not, :monster:

There's just so many thingies in discourse that I only find missing in vB now that I actually seen a new / modern thing.

Anyway bit of a status update: I've finished the import of vB posts into a development instance of Discourse (on a laptop, in a virtual machine) after about 56 hours; this is the default, "slow" import that takes each user, post, etc, and runs them through the normal code paths of Discourse to add new users / posts / etc. I've been able to mark my account as an admin and get into the installation locally, and I've done a very cursory glance at the post and category listings, everything seems to have transferred over normally.

Two things that I missed; attachments and avatars. For avatars to transfer over, I need to make a change in vB first so that they're stored in the database instead of the server's file system. Alternatively people will have to just set a new avatar; given the new style and much smaller space for avatars I'm sure most people will opt for that. The other thing, attachments, that was probably just laziness on my part, I need to provide an attachment path when importing. Should probably read the instructions a bit closer when going for the actual thing.

Anyway, after running that main import, I'm supposed to start a thing that will run a load of background tasks; it queues up 2 million of the things, what I've seen in the logs is that it mostly involves starting the new user onboarding flow (there's a bot that will welcome you and point you to some things), importing avatars from Gravatar, and a bunch of other not too important stuff. I'm having a bit of trouble with that, it seems to lock up after a while. But even if it doesn't, it still does only a couple of tasks per minute, so finishing them all will take forever it seems.

I can probably get away with not doing those, or, only doing them after moving the forum over. The next steps will be first to sanitize the imported stuff - that is, reset user groups, check group memberships, and make sure certain categories are only visible to certain user groups. Once that's set I can make a backup on my local dev machine, and restore it on the test site for public viewing and shit. I think I'll get on that during the weekend.

For the real deal though, I'll redo the development installation and just run it natively on my laptop (instead of in a virtual machine), that should hopefully be quicker. I also hope it'll run at an acceptable speed on our main server. I think it probably will, IIRC our main server is faster than the $10/month server we have the discourse trial running on atm.

Anyway, complicated enterprisey shit y0, :monster:
 
X-SOLDIER

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Thanks for all the work and shit that you're all doing to get this up and running an shit. :awesomonster:





X :neo:
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Yarup, although in this case I think I'd prefer if it just works :monster:

Another idea is to shell out for the hosted version, buuuut that's starting at $100 / month so nope :monster:
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Right, what I need to do (still, hue) is clean up the forums, make sure threads that shouldn't be public are not public, make a backup, and install it on the test site. I've given up on trying to make a million background tasks finish, the VM just freezes up after a while. Might work better if I install it natively on my dev thing, should give that a try later on.
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Ah fuck I had a tl;dr post in here and hit back annnd Lazarus no longer works because it violates the store policy. Fuck :monster:

Anyway, shorter version, I've migrated a backup from back when to the test board at https://discourse.thelifestream.net/, go and do the thing but read on first.

VERY IMPORTANTE: If you see anything you're not supposed to - e.g. sensitive staff threads, spam threads, donator stuff - let me know ASAP, shoot me a PM in Discord. I might be away to do some dank housekeeping though, :awesome:.

LOGGING IN

All accounts should have been transferred over properly, but not the passwords. To reset your password, go to the login page and hit the "I forgot my password" thing, a password reset link should be mailed to your registration e-mail address then.

KNOWN ISSUES

urgh I already wrote these but hey.

* Missing avatars - a thing we'll need to change before importing
* TLS theme is incomplete - Flint's working on it, but idk when he'll be able to finish it - please let me know if I or someone else should take over Flint. If no reply we'll have to go ahead with it anyway.
* Missing attachments - something with the import again, will look into it when we go for reals.
* Quotes are broken - Some are, some aren't, IDK why; we should probably just leave it.
* youtube, spoilers, gfycat, etc - These will all need to be addressed individually. For new posts though, you can just paste the link and discourse will embed them automagically.

I had a bunch more, but, :monster:
 
Carlie

Carlie

CltrAltDelicious
AKA
Chloe Frazer
I tried the "I forgot my password" but is giving me a message saying "No account matches the username Chloe Frazer". Same message with my email address.
 
Cthulhu

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Have you tried Chloe_Frazer? I had that written out but it got lost; usernames with spaces in their usernames have had those replaced with underscores.

Also your e-mail address on there is something girl power @ hotmail.com, just in case.
 
Teioh

Teioh

Pro Adventurer
AKA
Teiocho
It looks to be a backup of the forums from around December last year so maybe since you're a new member registered this year there hasn't been a transfer of your account yet? I can't find any of the new members registered this year in the user list anyway.
 
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