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Forum Upgrades

edited January 2006 in Forum Stuff
Hello forum users! Today I upgraded the forum hopefully to serve our community better. I hope you like the changes because they are here to stay.

The most obvious change is the theme. I hope you like the new default them better than the old one, I do at least. But even if you don't like it, that's ok. You can change your theme if you want! Right now there are three to choose from: the old theme, the new blue theme and a red version of the new theme. Go to the account tab and click change stylesheet to change your theme.

The next change is rather small, you'll notice it on the left of the page. It's a little pulldown that lets you view only certain categories of messages. This should be helpful now that there are multiple pages of discussions.

The third change is the addition of private messaging, aka whispering. You can now create private discussions between yourselves that are not visible to everyone else on the forum. Just start a new discussion and enter somebody's username in the whisper box. It's that easy.

The best part about whispering is that you can whisper from within an existing discussion. For example, you are talking with four people about bananas. Two guys go off arguing about the gros michel banana vs. the cavendish banana. You whisper to your friend "man, I wish these guys would shut up". To you and your friend it looks like a normal post in that discussion. But those other two arguing guys don't see it. And the website will help you type people's usernames in the whisper box. How awesome is that? Very awesome.

I hope you have fun with the new forum, keep up the good talks.
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Comments

  • I just added avatars. Go to your account tab and you can use any image for your avatar. It will be resized to 32x32 pixels no matter what. As far as I know you can use gif, jpg or png. If anyone has an avatar that is unpleasant to look at I'll get rid of it. No goatse. Other than that, go nuts.
  • One last thing. You can now click on the title of the forum to go back to www.frontrowcrew.com more easily. By title I mean the big white words that say "Front Row Crew Forums". It is possible I might make a few more changes up there later.
  • Ok, sorry everyone. There was a problem with the forums. I made it worse, but not too much worse. You just have to re-upload your avatars. Sorry again. Listen to the podcast tonight for the full story.
  • Alright! Two new features have been added to the forum. Actually, one of them is a bugfix.

    1) BBCode now actually works!

    2) You can now preview your posts before you submit them! Just click the preview button down there.

    w00t!
  • Guess what? I've upgraded the hosting. What does this mean for you? It means that the website and the forum will be faster. This will have no effect on downloads of GeekNights mp3s, those are hosted by libsyn. Everything else here at frontrowcrew.com will be much better. Basically, all the power of our hosting has been exactly doubled.

    Of course, the cost of the hosting is exactly doubled as well. What was once $40 a month is now $80. This isn't really that big of a deal. We can easily afford this cost. However, it comes out to be almost $1000 a year. Makes me cringe a little when I think about it that way. So we've decided to put a paypal donate link in the bottom right corner of frontrowcrew.com. Keep in mind we are not asking for donations. In fact, we're telling you not to donate. We probably have more money than you, so you shouldn't give us anything. However, if you feel absolutely passionately compelled to give us some cash we will no longer prevent you from doing so. We will talk more about this on Monday's episode.
  • Hooray! Vanilla 1.0, the newest bestest version of this forum software has been released. Tonight I am going to attempt an upgrade, so expect a little bit of downtime. Only the forum will be down, everything else will be perfectly fine.
  • Alright, there is going to be a bit of delay in getting the forum upgraded. I practiced upgrading a copy of the forum on the server in my house, and there were some bumps in the road. Previewing posts didn't work so well. Also, I couldn't get the old database to work with the new code. As soon as the bumps are ironed out I will upgrade and you will be able to enjoy these new features.
    1. Editing whispers will no longer unwhisper them
    2. Better ability to quote other people
    3. No more needing to learn bbcode or html
    4. Easier ways to search the boards
    5. RSS feeds to monitor discussions instead of just Atom feeds.
    6. The theme will look even nicer.
    7. Spell checking to ward off Mr. Period
    8. And much much more...
    So just stay on the lookout for all that coming soon to a forum near you.
  • edited July 2006
    The forum is upgraded. Enjoy all the new features!
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • In our carelessness we allowed the clock on the server to drift many hours ahead of the actual time. The "Who's online" extension and some other parts of the site rely on the time quite heavily. However, by tomorrow when the clock catches up to itself, everything will work properly again. Also, the clock will never float away again.
  • The forum now has polls, as promised. However, "normal" users can not create polls. If you want a poll to be created, send a whisper to a moderator.
  • I just upgraded the forum from Vanilla 1.0 to 1.0.1. There should be a lot of bugs fixed and other nice things. Let me know if you have any problems.
  • You can now add your XBox Live gamercard to your profile. Someone test it because I don't have an XBox.
  • This isn't a confirmation that the gamercard thing working, but it's something that seems related. I noticed this after reading the bit about there being a user category douchebag. I did a search for banned users and tried viewing one of their profiles and got the following message.
    Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /var/www/frc/htdocs/forum/extensions/MyGamerCard/default.php on line 20
    The few non-banned user profiles I looked at didn't result in this error.

    It may just be that profiles of banned members don't get updated to work with new features, and it's not the most vital of functions, but I thought I'd mention it.
  • You can now add your XBox Live gamercard to your profile. Someone test it because I don't have an XBox.
    It doesn't seem to work. My gamertag is Abikyokan.
  • Is there a "mark all read" button somewhere?
  • Is there a "mark all read" button somewhere?
    Now there is.
  • I upgraded the forum theme and many extensions. If you have any problems, say so.
  • It's not marking the sticky threads as read.
  • edited December 2006
    It's not marking the sticky threads as read.
    I just checked the code of the extension. It will only mark unread discussions that were started in the past one week as read. I can reconfigure it for larger or smaller amounts of time, but the more time I set it for the more of a burden on the server it creates. I am looking at the code to see if there is a better way to do this. More later.

    You can also go to the page for a particular category and mark that category as read.
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • Ewww..... Very Interesting.

    How does the database track if I have read it or not? Is there a table with userID, postID and a bool for read or not read? Or is it thread based with userID, threadID and lastpostreadID?

    I'm just curious as I've been getting more and more into PHP with mySQL coding lately.
  • Ewww..... Very Interesting.

    How does the database track if I have read it or not? Is there a table with userID, postID and a bool for read or not read? Or is it thread based with userID, threadID and lastpostreadID?

    I'm just curious as I've been getting more and more into PHP with mySQL coding lately.
    Download a copy of Vanilla, install it and look at the database. You'll learn more that way.
  • Can there be a way for a user to delete his/her own duplicate/nonsensical posts? I've started two threads accidentally without checking to see if the topic has already been opened (before I quit the boards for a month). Or this this considered an extended privilege for moderators only? I only ask because other forums allow a poster to delete his/her own posts.
  • Can there be a way for a user to delete his/her own duplicate/nonsensical posts? I've started two threads accidentally without checking to see if the topic has already been opened (before I quit the boards for a month). Or this this considered an extended privilege for moderators only? I only ask because other forums allow a poster to delete his/her own posts.
    Don't make nonsensical or duplicate posts in the first place. We try to design the forums in such a way as to encourage users to not post very hastily. We want you to give every one of your posts that extra bit of time and attention that makes the discussions on this forum the highest quality. That being said, when there are obviously useless discussions created, we delete them at our discretion.

    Think before you post the same way you look both ways before you cross the street.
  • Hey Scott, can you activate Vanilla's Digg account tie-in? That's good times.
  • Woo. That is good times.
  • Hey Scott, can you activate Vanilla's Digg account tie-in? That's good times.
    Alright, I added it. Might as well make those profile pages more useful.
  • Danka. That way I can check from time to time on the peeps I didn't add to my friends list.
  • Danka. That way I can check from time to time on the peeps I didn't add to my friends list.
    As long as it's being used.
  • Would it be possible to fix the spacing when quoting somebody that used some fancy-schmancy (bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, and maybe links) formatting? I've noticed it on some of my posts and corrected it, but it shouldn't do that.
    I was thePresidentof the U.S.A.
    Why does it do that?
  • Would it be possible to fix the spacing when quoting somebody that used some fancy-schmancy (bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, and maybe links) formatting? I've noticed it on some of my posts and corrected it, but it shouldn't do that.
    I was thePresidentof the U.S.A.
    Why does it do that?
    In Vanilla there are various text formatters. Unlike other forums, where what you type in the box is what gets displayed, all text is run through a filter to change formatting and such. Of course, these filters are a little bit buggy, and I have to upgrade them a bit. One of the bugs is that it removes spaces around tags when quoting. Things like this are on the list to be fixed. Have patience.
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