Our Third Impact is Nigh -- Upgrade Incoming

[Monk Ed]

We're moving to a new server -- and new software. EGF for the past several years has been running on an increasingly ancient and difficult-to-maintain forum software, so it's time for an upgrade to its most modern counterpart, which is the secret project that's been brewing in the background that Tines mentioned in a nearby topic.

The transition will not be seamless. There will be a service outage of, we hope, only a few hours at some point over the holiday weekend, after which the forum will come back looking very different, albeit only until we can get it looking like its old self again (or perhaps something new entirely).

Some old features will go inactive until we can get them up and running again, and some new ones will pop up, so don't be alarmed -- there will be kinks to work out.

[robersora]

As long as the people have access and the posts are still there, and most importantly, there's still a place for the beautiful angel headers I'm looking forward to it! Thank you for putting all your time and dedication into keeping this forums running :)

[Dima]

Finally, it was about time.

[Rosenakahara]

Great, hopefully the forum is back up for actual 3I day.

[A.T. Fish]

Good to know. To be honest I'm mostly fine with EGF as is, but there are some conveniences present in other forums, that run on better software, that I'd love to see here, most importantly the ability to easily quote multiple posts.

[TheFriskyIan]

Will I ever get my school banner back?

[Chuckman]

I advocate the permanent retirement of the school banner, because I am change.

[Sachi]

Everything is going according to Seele's scenario. All is well in the world.

[NemZ]

Will I ever get my school banner back?

Ideally they will all be available through styles menu eventually, including the original.

[FreakyFilmFan4ever]

I am predicting totally epic and Earth-shattering Shin Eva news to come during this site's confusion, and there being no coherent or working way to GET. HYPED. over it on this forum.

[Sicarius VI]

^ Of Course, but then we can talk about it with a new and improved forum!


Anyhow, has this version of forum software been around almost as long as Eva has? I did some research on it, and it's been the same since EGF opened in 2004. Ironic that we change the same time we approach the real date of 3I!

[pwhodges]

Will I ever get my school banner back?

My plan for the initial themes (as I seem to have elected myself theme-master for now) is that there will be a choice between one with the current banner, whatever it is, and one with a banner that chooses randomly on different visits or refreshes between all those so far released (including the school banner). A means for making a more focused choice will be worked out later; but first is to get something up and running.

We are also planning something different to replace the coloured boxes for different responsibilities, but that probably won't make the first cut - not too long after though, I hope.

[Chuckman]

May I ask what software you plan to use?

[pwhodges]

Just the current version of phpBB* - v3.1 (if you mean the rotating banner in particular, that's just two rewrite lines in the Apache config). I've chosen a third-party theme that's pretty like our present one as the basis I'm working on for new themes.

There has been a lot of work to find how to convert the forum posts to work in the new version, because the old software is very hacked about in the area of character sets, which matter a lot for us (!), and the provided converter didn't get everything right as it stood. The updated software is Unicode-savvy, so there should be no character set issues any more.

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* I experimented with SMF, as that's what I use for the forums I run, by preference; but the post conversion routine for that turned out to be too far out of court to be worth trying to hack into shape.

[Mr. Tines]

There has been a lot of work to find how to convert the forum posts to work in the new version, because the old software is very hacked about in the area of character sets, which matter a lot for us (!), and the provided converter didn't get everything right as it stood.

To give the membership an idea of how bad things were, up until about a week ago there were quite a number of posts here that appeared to be blank if you went to them, and using the full editor on them got a "post not found" error (but could be opened in the AJAX quick editor); a number more which appeared blank but would open in the full editor. All of those, and more converted to empty posts in the new system. Some of them could be fixed by tuning the conversion program, but hand-editing was required in certain places.

For the technical details -- the forum works on the assumption that the text is stored as UTF-8; however it turned out that there were a number of posts actually encoded as in CP-1252 (Windows single-byte character set with high-bit set printable characters like smart-quotes or accented letters, which make broken UTF-8), Shift_JIS or EUC_JP (pre-Unicode representations of Japanese text), and thereby failing to interpret as UTF-8, and turning out blank. In addition, a few recent posts from iPhones have contained emoji characters that are from the Unicode first astral plane, and a few posts from three years ago contained astral characters for musical notation -- the converter choked on the 4-byte UTF-8 sequences involved, so those posts had to be hand edited (and will have to be hand edited back later).

[Monk Ed]

With the character set issue we're technically still not completely out of the woods -- fixing posts is one thing, but with PMs we can't even check our work. Instead, I've hacked the converter to just shove PMs into their appropriate slots in the new database if they otherwise fail the conversion process, which will at least get all the bits and bytes in their proper place whether they're interpreted correctly or not.

So if something goes funky with your PMs, uh... you'll have to elect to let us know. And I'll keep the final backup of the old instance in cold storage in case issues get discovered way down the line with old posts or PMs.

[TehDonutKing]

Just please don't remove the ugly style. Or, at least, give us themes that are more colorful than gray, grey, and græy.

[pwhodges]

It's not a matter of removing anything or not - it's a matter of finding the time to implement them again in the new software. Even if the present forum software had not become incompatible with its original version, styles did not carry over from v2 to v3 or subsequently to v3.1.

The ugly style will not be there from the start; but I guess it could be added back if there's enough persuasion (and cookies - I like cookies).

[xPearse]

Oh. That's interesting. Will there be an interface update or just stuff in the background?

[pwhodges]

Ten years and two major versions of interface changes... I'll be trying to make it much like the present, but some things will inevitably end up a bit different. This is how it looked this morning; I'm just getting the menu box programmed in at present: