Forum software upgrade (for real now)

[Flintlock]

I was planning to work on the theme today but post-migration my account no longer has the necessary permissions.

Edit: The theme is also looking a lot worse now than it did when I last checked. Not sure if that's due to the migration or a Discourse software upgrade breaking things.

 

[Lex]

I think Yop's the only one with permissions on there right now, the migration seems to have taken normal TLS account data but obviously the permissions couldn't migrate over :/

And I think he disabled the theme.

 

[ForceStealer]

Well the TLS theme was still available in my preferences.

It is different from before though, and makes the normal text almost impossible to read.

 

[Cthulhu]

Well IDK if you've made any changes since I did the export of the theme a while back, so er, idk . I've changed Flint's account to an admin one, let me know if anyone else needs access. To the test board, that is; we'll have to sort out permissions for real once we move over for real, and the permissions on Discourse aren't as fine-grained as on TLS (like, you're either admin or not, kinda thing).

 

[Flintlock]

It turns out that the CSS was saved but the colour scheme and some other customisations disappeared. It's gonna take a while just to get things back to where they were before, which is frustrating. In the meantime I applied the standard dark colour scheme to the theme, so at least most things are legible again.

Edit: Just FYI, as I now have admin permissions, I can see certain areas of Discourse which I can't see on vB. The private feedback forum, for instance. I'm not going to go poking around but I thought I should mention it.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

So, given that in the Discourse format, Sub-Sub Sections aren't really so much a thing the way that they are here on vB, I was thinking that we could split up that giant clutterfuck of things in "General" into something a bit more logically manageable in that format:

GENERAL FORUM TALK
• Introductions, Departures, & Birthdays
• Meetups & Conventions
• General Discussion
• Creativity
• Clubs

TOPICAL DISCUSSION
• Entertainment
• (General) Gaming
• The Venue
• Comics
• Technology
• News, Politics, Religion, & Debate

ARCHIVE
• Any other shit we want to keep for reasons™

While I'm sure that there're better labels we could come up with, my thinking here is that it'd basically split things into conversations that are generally Forum-User driven and those that're based around something externally driven. That'd move things like "Technology" a little bit now, but I think that that section'd thrive a little bit better in a slightly altered format.

Conceivably, I could even just change that layout here & now, so we could get used to is, and that it'd be a bit easier transferring things over – assuming that wouldn't fuck with things terribly.

Anyhow, thoughts?





X

 

[Cthulhu]

It turns out that the CSS was saved but the colour scheme and some other customisations disappeared. It's gonna take a while just to get things back to where they were before, which is frustrating. In the meantime I applied the standard dark colour scheme to the theme, so at least most things are legible again.

Edit: Just FYI, as I now have admin permissions, I can see certain areas of Discourse which I can't see on vB. The private feedback forum, for instance. I'm not going to go poking around but I thought I should mention it.

I don't think I'm able to filter you out of those, so, I'll just hide those for everyone. Also that section should probably go, it's not been used / needed in forever. Also I just gave it a go, can't hide it for everyone at least (I mean that'd mean hiding it for me too). I'll just delete that one for now. PM me if there's sectios you can see you shouldn't be seeing.

edit: narp, can't bulk delete either. argh.

 

[Flintlock]

The "reorder categories" feature is kinda broken. It assigns every category a priority (0, 1, 2, 3...) and uses those priorities to determine the order categories should be displayed in. Clicking the "move up" arrow on category 3 should swap it with category 2, but it doesn't; instead it does 3 -> 2 and 2 -> 4, meaning there are two categories with priority 4 and none with priority 3. Trying to type the numbers in manually is obnoxious because categories jump to their new position after each digit you type, even if you were going to type more. And after playing around with it for a while, the whole thing reset itself to an order I never gave it at all. I was hoping to put the categories in the order we have them here on vB for an easy comparison but I think I'll steer clear of it altogether and let other people worry about it.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

The "reorder categories" feature is kinda broken. It assigns every category a priority (0, 1, 2, 3...) and uses those priorities to determine the order categories should be displayed in. Clicking the "move up" arrow on category 3 should swap it with category 2, but it doesn't; instead it does 3 -> 2 and 2 -> 4, meaning there are two categories with priority 4 and none with priority 2. Trying to type the numbers in manually is obnoxious because categories jump to their new position after each digit you type, even if you were going to type more. And after playing around with it for a while, the whole thing reset itself to an order I never gave it at all. I was hoping to put the categories in the order we have them here on vB for an easy comparison but I think I'll steer clear of it altogether and let other people worry about it.

I am definitely ok with being the person to eventually reorganize those.





X

 

[Deleted member 546]

I have no problem with X's proposed rejig of the subsections. It's logical.

 

[ForceStealer]

 

[Cthulhu]

The "reorder categories" feature is kinda broken. It assigns every category a priority (0, 1, 2, 3...) and uses those priorities to determine the order categories should be displayed in. Clicking the "move up" arrow on category 3 should swap it with category 2, but it doesn't; instead it does 3 -> 2 and 2 -> 4, meaning there are two categories with priority 4 and none with priority 3. Trying to type the numbers in manually is obnoxious because categories jump to their new position after each digit you type, even if you were going to type more. And after playing around with it for a while, the whole thing reset itself to an order I never gave it at all. I was hoping to put the categories in the order we have them here on vB for an easy comparison but I think I'll steer clear of it altogether and let other people worry about it.

I didn't know that feature existed, wow . Just tried it out, and wow, it really is shit! You'd think they'd give it a much more straightforward drag and drop interface or something but narp. It really is hit and miss with this thing.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

So, given that in the Discourse format, Sub-Sub Sections aren't really so much a thing the way that they are here on vB, I was thinking that we could split up that giant clutterfuck of things in "General" into something a bit more logically manageable in that format:

GENERAL FORUM TALK
• Introductions, Departures, & Birthdays
• Meetups & Conventions
• General Discussion
• Creativity
• Clubs

TOPICAL DISCUSSION
• Entertainment
• (General) Gaming
• The Venue
• Comics
• Technology
• News, Politics, Religion, & Debate

ARCHIVE
• Any other shit we want to keep for reasons™

In light of this looking like a logical decision, would there be any opposition to me just rearranging the forums nao, fgj? Should I put up some sort of poll or whatnots, or ought I have the power-tripping authorities to just change all this and let folks figure it out for themselves?





X

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Got bored & just sorted things.

Hopefully this means moar feedback since people're likely to notice it now, and maybe a better idea on what to call the General & Topical sections as well.





X

 

[InterfaceLeader]

Hey, so I went to test the new discourse forum! Signed up fine. Started to make a post, cancelled the post, and got hit with an alert that went off my screen (I'm on a 13' macbook, chrome, 1280 x 800). I couldn't close it even when hitting back or return, so ended up having to close the tab.

I took a screenshot, but was unable to figure out how to upload it here...

 

[Roger]

Hey, so I went to test the new discourse forum! Signed up fine. Started to make a post, cancelled the post, and got hit with an alert that went off my screen (I'm on a 13' macbook, chrome, 1280 x 800). I couldn't close it even when hitting back or return, so ended up having to close the tab.

I took a screenshot, but was unable to figure out how to upload it here...

Can't take a screenshot on my phone but is it

Server Error
While trying to load /u/cthulhu/u/summary.json

Error code: 502 error

?

 

[Cthulhu]

That's annoying, :/. Did that happen on the default Discourse skin or the TLS skin? If the former, could you report it to https://meta.discourse.org/c/bug or https://meta.discourse.org/c/ux?

The 502 is something I should look into, should appear in the logs.

 

[Roger]

Haven't been able to reproduce the error in either theme but on my laptop cancelling a post wih the tls theme does present an issue

The "Abandon post? No, Keep" pop-up doesn't resize with the window like the default theme.

 

[InterfaceLeader]

Yes, it was the alert pop-up in Minato's post and because it was off screen I couldn't make it go away.

I haven't seen the 502 error. But I will keep poking about.

When is the planned migration? o.o

 

[Flintlock]

Hey, so I went to test the new discourse forum! Signed up fine. Started to make a post, cancelled the post, and got hit with an alert that went off my screen (I'm on a 13' macbook, chrome, 1280 x 800). I couldn't close it even when hitting back or return, so ended up having to close the tab.

The "Abandon post? No, Keep" pop-up doesn't resize with the window like the default theme.

That was my fault but I noticed it myself earlier today. It should be fixed now.

I've been doing incremental work on the theme most days for the past week or so but it's slow going.

One interesting thing I've noticed is that Discourse chooses how to present itself not by browser/viewport width but on something else, probably user agent strings. If you open the forum in your browser and resize it to iPhone 6/7/8 size, it looks broken:

Spoiler: Expand

But if you open it using Chrome's developer tools with iPhone 6/7/8 selected, it switches to a different layout:

Spoiler: Expand

It's just something to be aware of when testing.

Unrelated: Yop, could you reinstall the BBCode plugin?

 

[Cthulhu]

There was a bbcode plugin?

Sure let me do the thing.

edit: er; there's two plugins currently installed, a default one (docker_manager) and a signatures one. Was it this one?

 

[Flintlock]

I dunno. That page says:

Out-of-the-box: Discourse already supports [i], [b], [s], [u], [quote], [url], [email] and [code], this plugin fills in some more of the gaps to provide a more “BBCode” ™ experience.

[QUOTE] on its own works, but [QUOTE="Flintlock, post: 0"] not only doesn't link to the previous post – I'm not sure if that's even possible – but doesn't show up as a quote at all. Example.

On this page it's suggested that tags like [UL] and [LI] work as well, but they don't on our installation. What's interesting there is that here on VB, lists are actually created with [LIST] and [*], not [UL] and [LI], so the migration script has clearly changed them already... to something that doesn't work.

 

[Cthulhu]

I did notice that some quotes don't work - some do, some don't, and I haven't figured out why not. Go and have a look on some of the other threads, I think I even saw some links / references to posts. I did try to fix them manually but no luck, it's like the system ignores edited posts. This may be one of those things that the post-import script tries to fix though, not sure because I never finished it. Might try another run on a properly setup system sometime.

re: bbcode, that post refers to a file in https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/test/javascripts/lib, but it no longer exists. There is this file which contains some unit tests for bbcode, but it doesn't seem to have a proper test for the [ul] code. There's two actual files for parsing bbcode (I think), bbcode-inline and bbcode-block; the latter does have the list tag, but no ul tags.

I did some moar digging, and this commit from July last year seems to be replacing the bbcode / markdown parser; you can see in red the old bbcode.js.es6 file which was removed, and in there references to an [ul] tag. TL;DR that page you linked to is no longer up to date and they dropped support of the [ul] tag, in favor of plain markdown lists. I am seeing a reference to a

• bbcode, but idk how that's supposed to work / doesn't seem to work.
  
  TL;DR of the TL;DR, either we change the markup or submit a patch to get it fixed. Probably same for the quotes. Alternatively we submit a bug report, but no clue if / when that'll be picked up; I don't believe bbcode would be a high priority for them.

 

[Flintlock]

I've taken the Discourse theme as far as I intend to for the time being. As far as I'm concerned, it is decent enough now that it should not be considered a blocker for migration. There are still things that can be improved but that will be an ongoing process. And there are still non-theme issues to sort out by people who aren't me.

I can give feedback to specific suggestions/complaints if anyone has them. Mage shared hers a long time ago so I'll finally address those.

I don't like the lack of grids/dividers. I know it can't be a carbon copy of what we've got ATM, but it's easier on the eyes.

There are plenty of horizontal dividers, just no vertical ones in the default theme, and I haven't added any myself. They're not used much in modern websites. I suppose it's a personal preference. Easy to add later.

What's the difference between 'all categories' and 'Categories'?

I've renamed "All categories" to "Choose a category" to make it clearer that it's a drop-down.

Why are there user icons on Latest Posts? Seems gratuitous

Discord default. I suppose it's useful to see who's been posting in a thread recently.

I don't like the static image being visible behind the banner. Also having different themes would be nice, but not necessary. Would like to propose Moogle, Gold Saucer and Cosmo Canyon skins.

Something for the distant future, perhaps. As for the static image, it's the same setup we have on our front page at the moment. However, it wouldn't be too much effort to make a spinoff theme without it so that the whole page scrolls down, including the background.

keyboard shortcuts is obscured by the menu.

I believe this is fixed.

The homepage feels like there's something missing at the bottom.

The footer from our front page has been added.

definitely needs a lot more tweaking to make it feel more like TLS, the materia balls need to be used somewhere. Also the icons for thanks and stuff need to be customised.

This is still the case, and it'll definitely be taken care of at some point. We will probably need some new icons since the current "thanks" button, for example, does not look good on the new theme. The materia ball should be good to use as-is.

 

[Cthulhu]

Awesome, thanks for the update. I agree that we can tweak / iterate on the design slowly over time, I mean it took a while before we had the materia balls and shit earlier.

I'll be away this weekend, but I think we should be able to pick a (rough) date range for the migration, start announcing it. Given my previous experiences in the migration, I'm going to guess the full thing will take at least three days - mostly spent waiting, off course. I should set up a proper environment on my local machine to do the migration, the previous one was err, not very successful - mostly, things that are calculated after the move (ranks and such) didn't finish / locked up.

I'd propose letting people know (via a banner or whatever appearing on all pages) that after a certain date, anything they post on TLS will not be transferred over to the new thing.