Board Upgrade POLL

[Spinward Flow]

It doesn't hurt to be properly medicated, either.

Spoiler

for those who don't know, I have Bipolar disorder. Meds keep me outside the cage.

There's a reason why the usenet group alt.sysadmin.recovery had the alternate name of the Scary Devil Monastery.

Do not taunt your BOFH ... for the LARTs are many, and the Clues are few (and some of us have more than our fair share).

 

[Grav_Moped]

You need to port the existing users. If you want to be conservative, then port those active in the past XXX days. Arguably not a serious concern, but the simple fact is that folks are tied to their identity, and if the users are not ported, then their identity is up for grabs for anyone to take.

If you can port the moot users, you can port all the users. No reason to port passwords, just port the contact email and let them run the "forgot password" service to log back in.

You really don't want to keep the old site alive.

The frank blunt truth is that there's marginal bandwidth to keep this site alive as is, adding another, even a read only site, is still going to be a great sucking sound of time and energy as kernels, tools, userspace, etc. evolve.

Keeping ancient, stagnant software is actually a lot of work. Keeping the "old site" is basically a death warrant, just a matter of when.

Porting the messages to the new site eliminates that problem, it gets maintained with all the rest. VB is ubiquitous enough that it should be doable. I imagine there's a lot of expertise in this user base that could help. I could help, PHP isn't my thing, but I have a true knack for this stuff. SQL is bread and butter stuff. I've been keeping arcane computer things alive for 30 years, and "this is Unix...I know this."

There's, what, 15+ years of content on this site. There's the common saying that "the internet never forgets", but it's not true. The Internet is a combination of a patient with Alzheimer's, and their mother. Forgetting most of the details, but remembering only the embarrassing parts.

This.

Seconded. Bring as much forward as possible, and preserve accounts to prevent a "land rush" for pre-existing names. I know nobody else would really want to be "me," but can see where it could cause issues for others.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I don't play Traveller anymore, rarely come here for the same reason, but still post once in a blue moon. Addy I used is defunct since 2015. How does this effect me?

 

[aramis]

I don't play Traveller anymore, rarely come here for the same reason, but still post once in a blue moon. Addy I used is defunct since 2015. How does this effect me?

We'll most likely purge the database of all emails and recovery information.

You'll have to register new for the new one.

It's also worth noting that we cannot transfer passwords unless the new software can import the database. (VB4 and VB5 cannot.)

Passwords are not stored directly; only a salted hash is stored, and the new software probably won't be able to use said hash.

 

[RandyB]

I don't play Traveller anymore, rarely come here for the same reason, but still post once in a blue moon. Addy I used is defunct since 2015. How does this effect me?

Change your email to a currently used one. If privacy is a high concern, create a free one just for this board. Protonmail does not require any second email or phone number to be attached, though the option is offered.

 

[whartung]

We'll most likely purge the database of all emails and recovery information.

Why would this be necessary? There's no issue with not transferring passwords, as I mentioned above, folks should just be able to "recover password" with their already registered email, just like they can do today. But obviously that can't be done if the email addresses don't get migrated in the user profile.

There should be no reason to lose that kind of information in a conversion.

The biggest issues I see are specifically things like the blogs and the galleries. Especially if there's no direct support in the new platform for such things.

But the users, forums, topics, and personal inboxes (again, unless the new forum doesn't support private messaging -- but what forum does that?) should all copy over with no real loss. The biggest issue there is simply things like emojis, BBCode, and direct HTTP links to old forum messages. And even that should be able to be mitigated with even a little amount of work. Even if we had to build up a meta-data cross reference during the conversion, we could preserve the old links. (And that would not necessarily be hard to do.)

This should not be that hard.

In essence, we really shouldn't lose anything.

This may seem hard to some, but it's not hard to people like me. This is straightforward stuff.

Please reach out if you need help. It can't hurt to ask before a decision is made to lose data.

Just because the out of the box scripts may not do what you want, doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible, or that it's not practical to do.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Logistical proposal.

I see that this thread has a thread number of 42215.
The post before this one in this thread has a post number of 627591.

When the lock and archive is done ... would it be possible to "reserve" a section of thread a post numbers in the new forums which will remain dedicated to the archive, with new threads and posts in the new forums starting at numbers above 1.

So, for example ...
New threads in the new forum start at thread number 50001.
New posts in the new forum start at post number 700001.

Point being that it then becomes very simple in a programming sense to set up an IF-THEN-ELSE interpreter to seamlessly route links between the (new) live forums and the (old) archived forums.

IF thread number > 50000 THEN route to new forum url ELSE route to archived forum url
IF post number > 700000 THEN route to new forum url ELSE route to archived forum url

Now, just because it's easy for me to conceptualize (and explain) such a system doesn't necessarily mean that such a system will be "simplicity itself" to program under the hood. This is, of course, where the age old saying of "just because I make it LOOK easy, doesn't mean it IS easy to do" comes into play ... but I figure that pulling this kind of stunt for the number scheme for tracking "what went where" should make life a lot simpler for anyone who needs to integrate access between a live and archived set of forum links. :CoW:

As always, Your Mileage May Vary™ of course.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Change your email to a currently used one. If privacy is a high concern, create a free one just for this board. Protonmail does not require any second email or phone number to be attached, though the option is offered.

I'm debating it. I've lost a of interest in Traveller as a whole for a variety of reasons, but still have a soft spot for it and its setting. That, and the people who post here are a little more informed than people on YouTube or Steam and elsewhere. So ... we'll see. But thanks for the suggestion.

 

[robject]

Nerds are at work on the problem.

Amateur nerds who love Traveller.

Please stand by.

 

[robject]

I'm debating it. I've lost a of interest in Traveller as a whole for a variety of reasons, but still have a soft spot for it and its setting. That, and the people who post here are a little more informed than people on YouTube or Steam and elsewhere. So ... we'll see. But thanks for the suggestion.

I admit my attention to Traveller has waxed and waned seasonally for as long as I've known Traveller, and this board (and its predecessors and whatever succeeds it) is great for resources, but usually does not energize me. This subscription is therefore useful and meaningful, but I don't get my "Traveller fix" from it.

 

[whartung]

Nerds are at work on the problem.

Amateur nerds who love Traveller.

Please stand by.

I'd prefer amateur Travellers who love nerding.

I honestly don't care who's working on it, all I care about is the data. And, simply, if someone is saying you're going to lose data, that we have to "start over", that they can't migrate, then somethings wrong. Really, really wrong. And I'm talking the primary message base here, I understand the blogs and galleries may be VB specific (though we could certainly save the artifacts and meta data).

Maybe there's something fundamental I'm missing, but as someone who has converted proprietary systems via plugging printer interfaces in to other computers and parsing reports to get raw data, I'm not the kind of person that says "impossible" to scenarios like this.

I've been clawing data out of determined information systems for decades.

I can even see writing filters to update the embedded links and rewriting the messages, port the emojis and other BBCode.

Migrating is a solvable problem.

 

[Leitz]

I'm in the "Find better options and go there" crowd. PHPBB, for example, is open source and its a lot easier and cheaper to find help on forums than to pay for a commercial product.

Another potential fun task would be to set up a sister Joomla based site and slowly port stuff from here to there. That would give you the historical data and separate the conversations. I've done this on a small scale, and we moved the "final result of the discussions" to a semi-static web page. Yes, it is work, but if you have the DB back-end already it should be easier to pull and collate. Assuming a non-propritary DB, that is.

I'm also in the "uses Gmail" crowd, so that's a thing too. The admins have been gracious and vigilant, though, for which I am grateful.

Addendum It looks like converting from VBulletin to PHPBB is already a thing.

 

[BRJN]

I also don't know the difference between versions and software, so no vote.

+1 for "do not lose the old data". Find a way to move it over (in chunks over time if need be - subforum by subforum?).

+1 for users being able to keep their monikers.

No vote recorded for transferring everybody vs mass invitations. I just want it to be easy / straightforward to get my account on the new board up and running. Do not inspire people to pick passwords from Dante's Inferno because the process feels like, well ...

And: post added so I'm an active recent user !

 

[tjoneslo]

XenForo upgrade

As one of the tech people who would performing upgrade work, I'd like to add an update to this topic.

We're planning on an upgrade to XenForo.

I've successfully done the installation and upgrade using a very current backup of the site. This correctly copies all of the posts, users, and many of the setup items.

The downside is the UX experience is different.

We're planning on repeating the process on the live site next weekend. Announcements will made to confirm the process.

After being part of two of the failed upgrades to vBulletin 5, I would agree that upgrade isn't a good one. I'm not interested in digging through the upgrade scripts to figure out why the don't correctly handle their own database changes.

We're not planning on the split / manually created site with the archive to it. While an interesting idea I reflect many of the concerns about not being easy to search and find the older information if everything is on, essential, a second site.

 

[whulorigan]

We're planning on an upgrade to XenForo.

I've successfully done the installation and upgrade using a very current backup of the site. This correctly copies all of the posts, users, and many of the setup items.

The downside is the UX experience is different.
.
.
.

We're not planning on the split / manually created site with the archive to it. While an interesting idea I reflect many of the concerns about not being easy to search and find the older information if everything is on, essential, a second site.

In that case, what essentially will be lost after the new site is online?

 

[whartung]

I've successfully done the installation and upgrade using a very current backup of the site. This correctly copies all of the posts, users, and many of the setup items.

The downside is the UX experience is different.

Have you considered opening this test site up to some members to let them poke through? They can well possibly highlight things you may be overlooking.

 

[tjoneslo]

In that case, what essentially will be lost after the new site is online?

The only thing we've found is the blogs. The XenForo importer doesn't work with the version of the Blog plugin Hunter installed. We're looking into importing the blog content at a later time.

 

[tjoneslo]

Have you considered opening this test site up to some members to let them poke through? They can well possibly highlight things you may be overlooking.

So far I've been working on a VM on my local machine. It was the fastest way to generate a workspace. Give it seems to be working, the plan was to push forward and fix anything after.

 

[BeRKA]

phpBB
https://www.phpbb.com/

(or maybe MyBB, Vanilla Forums, or XMB Forum)

 

[whartung]

As one of the tech people who would performing upgrade work, I'd like to add an update to this topic.

We're planning on an upgrade to XenForo.

Thanks for the update, I think you should make a formal announcement outside of this topic that you plan to do the switchover.

Are we going to be able to keep the messages in our mailboxes? Or will those be vanishing?