New forums, new styles

[kemp]

Well, I think I've got the main upgrade taken care of now and hopefully there won't be any serious problems. Sorry for the downtime this weekend... had some issues with the database but that should be sorted out now.

Please take notice on the front page there is a new section that shows who is online and it includes bots. These are NOT bad bots like we have had issues with before. Please do NOT delete them as they are the search engine bots that index the site. Without them, people won't find us when they search on Google or Yahoo for entheo plants or yopo seeds or super-funky-jungle-juice.  :mrgreen:

Yes, the style completely sucks however, I'll try to come up with something we can live with... or maybe even something half-decent... who knows. Give me a couple weeks to work on it.

Another issue is that searching will not work just yet. I have to run the script that will create the search tables and... I'm not really looking forward to doing that. It takes a long time to run and that is where I ran into issues last weekend so, I'm putting it off for the moment.

RSS feeds (for those who use them) will hopefully be up soon.

Taking a break~
kemp

[kemp]

Oh, by the way... I think we lost a few posts (hopefully not many) when stuff crashed this week. I didn't notice it till just yesterday mainly because everything was running fine for 2 days after I messed with things last weekend. I had a backup from last Saturday and restored the database with that. Sorry if you were one of the people who posted between Saturday and Wednesday and lost a post or 2.  

Until I am certain the forum is running well I will make semi frequent backups to avoid any major losses.

[Stonehenge]

Yeah, I'm glad to see it back up. I wrote Andy on thursday and he tried to get ahold of you but seemed to be unable to do so. He said friday he would email you. I sent you an email saturday.

When people tried to find this place from google, there was a message from "admin". You knew nothing about all that? It happened right after your last upgrade attempt. I know it's hard to do this stuff. Do we have greater functionality now?

[kemp]

When people tried to find this place from google, there was a message from "admin". You knew nothing about all that?

If it's the message that I am thinking of, then yes I knew about it... it was an old index.html file that was created for when the forums were down. I just left it as things were getting kinda messy with the database and also the .htaccess file that previously forwarded from http://www.spiritplants.org to http://www.spiritplants.org/phpbb/ was lost somehow.

Yeah, Friday is when I noticed the forum was down. I did get Andy's email then and yours this morning. Thanks for the heads up.

We do have greater functionality and more options to work with. The previous forum was phpBB 2.4 and we are now at 3.02. Check out the new admin & moderator control panels and you see some of the new options. Some of them come from a pre-modded version of phpBB3 to optimize for search engines. I went with this because it clearly helps with getting traffic to the site. In the admin CP you will see a tab that says "phpBB SEO Class settings", that is were most of those functions are (please don't change anything there).

There are too many changes for me to list so, I'll see if I can find a link to the documentation somewhere. In the mean time please do look around... lemme know if there is any other features you need as I might be able to find a way to add them.

kemp

[judih]

what a clear felt joy to see the place up and shining.i like the new clarity.

missing the spf logo, but the newness of it all is cool.

Thanks so much kemp for bringing the place back to where it belongs.

[Syd]

Thanks kemp, job well done. Take your break you deserve it! I for one like the style. It's not what we are used to but its not really that bad at all. In time I am sure we will get something we all like. Now I'll have to do some thinking about what I wanted to post about this weekend! I did miss the board, tho, it was definitely worth the wait.

[JRL]

I am starting to like the new look.

One thing I would like to change: when I click a link it used to open in a new window, now it doesn't. Is that a personal setting or for everyone?

[Stonehenge]

Hold down shift when you click a link and it will open in a new window. I'd like to see the old color scheme back. Black is depressing. Other than that, I like the new functionality. I see a number of changes have been made including certain absentee mods being gone and an absentee admin being now a mod.

Do we now have the ability to make the recycle bin visible to mods only? Or are you way ahead of me and did it already? I noticed the test post.

[JRL]

Anyone else having trouble staying logged on?

[cenacle]

Are you working on getting the chat and radio links up? Soon, I hope. Good job, Kemp!

[judih]

logo looks good.
jrl, i had to click onto 'login' twice, but as soon as i did, i was logged in, without re-typing  anything.

i find black a bit frightening. like i never know what's gonna jump out at me when the page first loads.

but the drama of it wakes me up - a good thing!

[senorsalvia]

I am not 'puter savvy whatsoever, but I've noted that with the new board, each page is taking 10-15 seconds to load..  Anybody else???  Could be my server (library, public access) I suppose...

[Glandmaster]

I prefer the new look - I use firefox to adjust most of the sites I visit to have a dark scheme anyway so this is all very convenient ;p If others wish to change colors do a search for accessibility add ons in firefox, add ons meant for blind peeps will be the best bet or greasemonkey if a bit of code doesn't scare you.

I have had to re subscribe via RSS too - I dont know if thats expected or something to have a look at.

Edit: OK I cannot find a RSS button now and teh googles says the site has no feed. If you are starting the feed from scratch it would be nice if it listed the posters name and the text of the post too. Another lil job to add to your list

[kemp]

JRL - You might need to delete all the spiritplants.org cookies from your browser. I think there might even be a link to do that somewhere on the forum. I will get back to you on that. The link thing I noticed too.... I have not seen an option to change that so, I guess we may have to do what Stoney recommended for now.

Stoney - Yes, I set x. torris & nitroburn back to mods since neither has been around in a long time. I think it's best to keep the permissions for the people who are active, for the most part. As for the style, that is one of the harder aspects as I don't have much experience with creating them. I basically downloaded this style and modded it so that we might have something other than the default (yucky). I will however keep at it and try to get something similar to what we had before so that people could choose the old style or the new one. Currently there is no way to use the old style... the code it just too different.
The post in the Recyle Bin is just that, I didn't do anything with that forum yet. I though I might leave it up to you guys to decide what you wanted to do with that. It's no problem though, if you want I can change it in no time to be viewable only by mods or something.

Cenacle - Yep, the chat and radio links are on the top of my list; they are not as difficult but still part of the overall design. I will try to have those up this weekend.

Glandmaster - The RSS feeds are also on the top of the list... also shooting to have those fixed by Sunday.

Senior - I had the same problem last weekend with the board taking a long time to load. It could be a few things causing it... maybe if you could clear out the temporary files and cache on the browser (if you can access it). If it's Firefox click on tools and then options, look under privacy- clearing private data. Probably something similar for IE to, not sure. It may also be the server here; now that I think we are fairly stable here I think I will delete some old database tables after I do a backup to see if that helps at all.

I was also thinking of adding a few new smilies... just for a little extra variety, I do not intend to get crazy and add hundreds of really odd-ball ones. I think many sites overdo it that way.

-kemp

[Stonehenge]

We have a bunch of new features now including the ignore function. I've tested it and it works great, I'm using it now. Other sites have had that for years but we finally got it. Other sites let you select the board skin you want. Maybe some day here.

X Torris was mod of the world but no more. Nitro showed up briefly a couple months ago. There are a few others who haven't been around in ages like Troutmask and some others. We may need to do some cleaning up one of these days. At least establish some standards.

The recycle bin should be easily converted over. I tried to do it under the old system but due to some sort of glitch, it never worked right. It would be visible only to admins and the mods couldn't see it. Or, make it visible only to registered users which is how we left it. I assume the new software does not have that glitch and we can do as we wish. That's the only thing that should be easy.