Temple of Ranma's Sailor Senshi Seifuku

Yo!

You might've noticed that we've been down for a few days. The host did it, in the server room, with chown. Our database was shut off temporarily because of undue load... how annoying. They didn't even contact us, though they claim to have sent an e-mail. Anyways, I decided to take the opportunity to update the forum software once I got access to the data back. And I did. MySQL made that a painful experience, but we're back now.

Of note, you can now use a spoiler BBCode tag to hide spoilers (duh). It looks like:

SPOILER: Whee - Show Spoiler

Snape kills Dumbledore.

There's also a "FanFiction.Net User ID" profile field now that'll make your user account show a link to your FF.Net page if you fill it in.

That's... about it, really. Other than that, it's phpBB3. Not a lot to say.

A couple things I've noticed so far...

1. For the FanFiction.NET ID... it should be noted that is the ID Number, not the ID Name... If one attempts to put in the name, it does not work. Currently, as of my last check, it merely stated ID.

2. Is there a way to get the poster ID's back on the left side? Seeing them on the right is disorienting to me.

3. There is something wrong with copy and paste out of the preview window when the text contains formatted BBCode tags. I just attempted it with a portion of my link lists, and the returns seem messed up, as if in the clipboard they are converted to all soft returns only, instead of the hard returns they were. This was definately not the case prior to the update.

If need be, I can submit a sample as a file attachment in a email, since if sent by way of the forum, it will not work as it would be automatically broken.

EDIT1: Further experimenting by me makes it *seem* (and I could be wrong) that it is due to a difference in how the php interpreter itself is interpreting the {list} and {/list} tags, since it seems to be around them it is the most messed up. I state that it might be the tags as they now appear to visually delete the long standing blank line present in a indented list.

It is not messed up per se in the preview or post, but copying out of the preview window to the clipboard into a text editer shifts things pretty bad. If it really is the bbcode tags and the PHP interpreter itself though, I question whether it is anything you can do about it.

EDIT2: It is not just the preview window... copying from any window with BBCode seems to have the effect.

And one further bug found as I type this post... typing in a post long enough to cause it to scroll down causes a jumping effect where the text in the window goes up and down slightly. This can be simulated by hitting return a few times, typing, then return a few more, typing, and so on until scrolling starts to occur. I am using IE 8.

Please note that IE8 is a new MS release... and new MS releases of anything are noteworthy for the number of bugs and glitches they contain. So far I'm not noticing any particular problems in my browser, Firefox 3.

It may simply be the usual case of Microsoft not being able to write a program that works correctly before they apply a ton of updates and fixes.

lwf58 wrote:Please note that IE8 is a new MS release... and new MS releases of anything are noteworthy for the number of bugs and glitches they contain. So far I'm not noticing any particular problems in my browser, Firefox 3.

It may simply be the usual case of Microsoft not being able to write a program that works correctly before they apply a ton of updates and fixes.

While you have a point, there is one issue with that... I went on IE8 before the forum crash, and I guarantee it was not doing this stuff on the old forum with no skins (or the default PHP one, not the custom one).

Actually... I've found overall IE 8 more stable than 7.x. It even manages so far to allow me to view manga better at onemanga without crashing like IE 7.x does and FireFox 3.x (3.0.4 was last version checked) did for me. Something I thought impossible.

A quick check of Opera 9.64 shows that it is also removing the additional line that used to be in the List code. But a copy form the main post view box does not have the issue IE8 does and is not messing with the returns.

I won't check FireFox and instead take your word for it. Over the years, I've had easily 10x the problems with that browser than I've had with IE and have the opposite view of the 2 browsers that many seem to have. Thus it is removed from my systems, ideally permanently, and 3.0.4 was the last version I ever had and the final straw was them breaking the bookmark import functionality on large imports. Opera seems far better and is serving decently as a backup browser and IE as my primary browser.

Good to know the site's back up, but I absolutely can't stand this new look. Is work being done to get the site back to looking like it used to?

I'm still using IE7x and it seems to be stable so far, for anything else, I use Safari for my windows based pc, It seams to be a lot more stable than Firefox3 for my brousing needs

PCHeintz72 wrote:1. For the FanFiction.NET ID... it should be noted that is the ID Number, not the ID Name... If one attempts to put in the name, it does not work. Currently, as of my last check, it merely stated ID.

That's using FanFiction.Net's naming, you know. The name field is Pen Name, and ID numbers are listed as ID. I thought it was, you know, completely obvious. And it's nicer too, since your ID number doesn't change, but you'd have to update the field if you used your pen name and you changed that.

PCHeinz72 wrote:2. Is there a way to get the poster ID's back on the left side? Seeing them on the right is disorienting to me.

Use subSilver. I don't have time to muck about with the skin to do something like that.

PCHeinz72 wrote:3. There is something wrong with copy and paste out of the preview window when the text contains formatted BBCode tags. I just attempted it with a portion of my link lists, and the returns seem messed up, as if in the clipboard they are converted to all soft returns only, instead of the hard returns they were. This was definately not the case prior to the update.

If need be, I can submit a sample as a file attachment in a email, since if sent by way of the forum, it will not work as it would be automatically broken.

Please submit a sample, because I am unable to reproduce what you've described with my system using the latest version of Internet Explorer (or any browser, for that matter). Mostly I'd just suggest getting an actual decent browser though. There are plenty of choices.

Comartemis wrote:Good to know the site's back up, but I absolutely can't stand this new look. Is work being done to get the site back to looking like it used to?

Sorry, but proSilver and subSilver are your only choices at this point. I suppose I could upload an already-made theme if you found one you preferred, but porting forward the old custom theme is completely out. I've got other things demanding my time that are much more important to me.

Please submit a sample, because I am unable to reproduce what you've described with my system using the latest version of Internet Explorer (or any browser, for that matter). Mostly I'd just suggest getting an actual decent browser though. There are plenty of choices.

Submitted by PM.

For added fun, and because I had to tweak something seekrit in the code, I just added a beginning and end post text field to user profiles, so you can set text that automatically shows up in the post editor. Not a whole lot of use, but I thought that certain members would appreciate it since they always colorize their text.

For example, set your start text to:

Code: Select all

[color=darkred]

...and your end text to:

Code: Select all

[/color]

And then, when you go to post/reply/quote/whatever, by default your post will contain the text:

Code: Select all

[color=darkred][/color]

And, if your browser wills it (and JavaScript works right), it'll focus the post editor and put the text insertion point (caret, whatever) between the start and end so you can just start typing.

Enjoy.

New question.

On the old version of the board. For topics I did not actually go into, when I exited, and came back later, they would no longer be listed as new unless newer posts than the last time I was on had occured.

Now... they stay as highlighted as unread when I come back. This is actually the better way to handle this, IMHO, so I consider it generally a good improvement... However, I see no way to unilaterally flag everything as having been read.

I checked the faq but did not see it... is there an option somewhere similar to the Invision board option to 'mark all posts as read'?

[quote="Spokavriel"][color=#bd527b] I'm not sure if it isn't showing up on Subsilver 2 but at the top under the last visit time stamp at the right hand side there's a Mark forums read link. And I know there's a mark topics read in every board because I spotted them just peeking through to see if everything was back. Almost in th exact same place except that it also has a thread and page counter next to that one pushing it more toward center.[/color][/quote]
Thanks. Did not see them at first

Thanks. For me, they are in the header bars and did not see them at first.

Well, well, well....

Another outage. How special.

We really haven't any idea what just happened this last weekend. I sent a note off to the hosting service, but they have not yet replied. I've tried tweaking the board a little to turn off a few features that looked unnecessary, and tried running an optimization cycle on the databases. We'll see if that helps.

It might just be a matter of having so many legacy messages in our databases that the server is having problems dealing with them all. I really don't know enough about bulletin boards to know if there's some sort of practical limit. Since I just got done trimming the user list, it doesn't seem likely that having too many users was the cause. After all, there are much larger boards that we are running out there.