Forum updates

[JeffT]

Tonight around midnight, the forums will be going down for approximately a couple of hours for software updates.

Thanks for your patience.

[Waffles]

Thank you for the heads up!

[superjaz]

what will we do!?!?

[JeffT]

The forums are back up. Thanks.

[JeffT]

Tonight the forums will be down again, starting about midnight, and lasting hopefully just a half hour, for minor updates.

[JeffT]

Back up.

[Washougal_Otaku]

Maybe it's just my technological ignorance, but what are the updates?

[guspasho]

Maybe it's just my technological ignorance, but what are the updates?

You mean you don't know???



 :wink:

[superjaz]

Maybe it's just my technological ignorance, but what are the updates?

You mean you don't know???



 :wink:

I know !!! I know!!! updates are when things get improved n new stuff in added or stuff s changed thats what an update is yay!!!!!!!!!! updates woot
(do i get a cookie now)

[JeffT]

Maybe it's just my technological ignorance, but what are the updates?

Two updates:

New captcha. (The spammers somehow started to figure out the one we put in a few weeks ago.)

Fixed minor database corruption (a known phpbb bug) that prevented us from making a certain configuration change.

[superjaz]

(so no cookie?   )

[guspasho]

Well, techncally, you were right, so I guess I do owe you a cookie. After all, you so kindly brought cookies to a few of the previous events.

[superjaz]

yay!!! c isfor cookie ad thats good enough for me
 woulda brought cookies to the last meetibg but i no there mabye for the next one i might do brownies mmmm i love chocolate

[Vondan]

yay!!! c isfor cookie ad thats good enough for me
 woulda brought cookies to the last meetibg but i no there mabye for the next one i might do brownies mmmm i love chocolate

Just because Gir is green don't be adding anything green to the brownies

[superjaz]

yay!!! c isfor cookie ad thats good enough for me
 woulda brought cookies to the last meetibg but i no there mabye for the next one i might do brownies mmmm i love chocolate

Just because Gir is green don't be adding anything green to the brownies

you can't tell me what to do i do what i wannaa doo!!!!
i gonna sing the doom song now....doom

[caitsith511]

yay!!! c isfor cookie ad thats good enough for me
 woulda brought cookies to the last meetibg but i no there mabye for the next one i might do brownies mmmm i love chocolate

Just because Gir is green don't be adding anything green to the brownies

you can't tell me what to do i do what i wannaa doo!!!!
i gonna sing the doom song now....doom

its true ^^;

[kylite]

The forums, they look and feel different. I like it.

[guspasho]

Welcome to the new forums. The first thing you'll notice is that the tracking of your read posts is significantly improved - after the initial conversion. For now, you'll have to catch up and click "mark as read" or "mark all messages as read". Once you do that the first time the forums will keep track of what is new for you, even if you log out without reading it!

Lots of other features... I invite you to explore around and try it out.

[guspasho]

Dang it. Something was bound to go wrong. If anyone notices anything else that appears wrong post it here and I'll see if I can fix it.

[Runa]

Wait! Why am I not "Man Faye" anymore?

... don't you think that's an improvement? You look much cuter as a bunnygirl.  

[RoamingGnome]

Also, your post count doesn't go up when you post new things

Ha ha ha Mr Mustash this is your punishment for trying to become the king of spam.

MWAHAHAHAHAHA 

[Greyman]

Awww, I like all the new features, but I prefer the look and feel of the older site. Is there anyway we can have the option of choosing between the forum themes to select the old one?

[totemo_oishii]

Awww, I like all the new features, but I prefer the look and feel of the older site. Is there anyway we can have the option of choosing between the forum themes to select the old one?

I second this.

Pretty please?

[guspasho]

Not really. The theme we had before was unique to the type of message board we used before, phpBB. I don't think the developers designed a similar theme for the new type of message board we adopted, SMF. I'll try to find an alternative theme for SMF though.

[guspasho]

Why did we switch away from phpBB. I've managed it before and liked it. But SQL is much better I'll admit.

Because SMF is much better

phpBB was over five years old and required mods to get any features, and you had to spend a lot of time figuring them out to get them to work, much less work with other mods in place. This forum is much newer and all these features are built in, ie I didn't need to mod them in.

There are lots of other cool features, like the cookie tracking working properly so your unread posts stay unread when you log out, and logging in doesn't become a burden on some people who don't log in regularly.

Also, for anyone else who hasn't seen it, Mustash has started this thread where people are discovering the various new features of this board: http://www.kumoricon.org/forums/index.php?topic=4770.0

[Negima]

What on earth??!!!! O.O
Look!!!!  My post count!!!!  It jumped up as though my old account came back to life!!!

[Negima]

My Post count isn't changing as I post again...

Wait, I think it is.  It looks different this time.....

[guspasho]

Are you going to change the forum Titles back?

Yes, we are working on that. There are some kinks to work out...

What on earth??!!!! O.O
Look!!!!  My post count!!!!  It jumped up as though my old account came back to life!!!

When your old account vanished it left your old posts behind, orphaned. So we guessed at which belonged to whom and merged your old posts with your new account

The same for the other two who lost their accounts once upon a time.

[guspasho]

Forum calendar!

http://www.kumoricon.org/forums/index.php?action=calendar

Yes, you can create your own events. Yes, you can start a topic somewhere and tie it to the calendar event. The default forum for that is Anime News but you can change that depending on your event; just don't clutter up Anime News with irrelevant stuff, ok? Keep spam in the spam forum.

[TomtheFanboy]

So why doesn't your post count go up if you post in the "SPAM" forums?

Maybe because they want the post count to better reflect how much a person is actually contributing to the online convention community as opposed to showing how much they are goofing off.
>_> <_<

[Trumby]

So why doesn't your post count go up if you post in the "SPAM" forums?

Maybe because they want the post count to better reflect how much a person is actually contributing to the online convention community as opposed to showing how much they are goofing off.
>_> <_<

Most of your posts are in the Spam forums too! SEE: http://www.kumoricon.org/forums/index.php?action=profile;u=144;sa=statPanel

Whether his posts are there or not isn't really relevant, as he sees what they most likely want the post count to reflect. It's like that on a few forums I frequent, the off topic (or spam in the case of this forum) forum doesn't count towards your post count.

I do have a question about these new forums though...it's not keeping me logged in. Is there anything special I need to do for that other than check the "always logged in" box?

[TomtheFanboy]

I do have a question about these new forums though...it's not keeping me logged in. Is there anything special I need to do for that other than check the "always logged in" box?

You have an "always logged in" button? I couldn't find it.

[guspasho]

I've noticed that too. Even though I told the forums to keep me logged in "forever" I was logged out when I came back after something like an hour of inactivity.

I also had some difficulty logging in last time. I got something that looked like a DB connection error. That may be related.

I'll see what the support forums say when I have some free time.

[Trumby]

I do have a question about these new forums though...it's not keeping me logged in. Is there anything special I need to do for that other than check the "always logged in" box?

You have an "always logged in" button? I couldn't find it.

Yeah, you have to hit "login" at the top and it'll take you to a login screen itself, instead of just logging in on whatever page you happen to be on.

And doing that and choosing "forever" gives me the DB error as well.

[TomtheFanboy]

Well, it seems better today at work.
My computer had me logged in when I opened the bookmark for the forum, so I'm fine now.

I'm using IE6 on Win 2K for reference.

[superjaz]

i still am wondering if i am in tron
shoulda read this post before makeing new thread oh well
it will take some getting used to
i just need to find that mark all post as read button

[JeffT]

What on earth??!!!! O.O
Look!!!!  My post count!!!!  It jumped up as though my old account came back to life!!!

When your old account vanished it left your old posts behind, orphaned. So we guessed at which belonged to whom and merged your old posts with your new account

The same for the other two who lost their accounts once upon a time.

Yes, and we merged the old PMs (both sent and received by those accounts) also. So you can read them again.

This happened back in January 2006 but we just didn't get around to fixing the problem until now. And we never did figure out why it happened; probably a phpbb bug.

[guspasho]

Sorry about the not-staying-logged-in issue. This is because we have two URLs, "kumoricon.com/forums" and "kumoricon.org/forums". When you switch between using one and the other, you lose your session and you don't appear logged in until you create a login session using the new URL.

The forums "live" on .com, and are mirrored over to .org. This isn't a problem except that the server setting for the forum for which URL it will use when you initiate a session only permits one URL.

Anyway, the reason this issue started to reappear is because we mixed up the URLs in that setting. It's fixed now. Use .com and you'll be fine.

[guspasho]

I would like to lodge a formal complaint against taking away our Spam post count. I know that being a spammer has about the same effect as being a /b/er but I liked having a high post count! I think that a post count should reflect how much time you put into the forums, even if it is just spam. I've gotten to know many of the con goes from the spam thread. And we've all become good friends!

*Puppy Dog Eyes* So please... *sniff* give me back my post count...

Spam is fun but spam is also spam. The spam forum is there to be crazy and have fun, but if the postcounts are to mean anything they should not show how big of a spammer a person is. That makes the postcount metric meaningless (if any meaning could have been drawn from it at all.) I realize there are all sorts of problems with using postcount to measure anything but the postcount should ideally be an indicator of how valuable of a contributor a member is, and postcount should be a badge of pride for those whose high postcounts reflect their significant and valuable contributions to the community through the forums. Artificially inflating your postcount through spamming, of course, detracts from the reward postcount provides to those contributors.

Maybe there's no point in attempting to measure anything with postcounts because of all the inherent inaccuracies, but I'd rather try at least rather than banish postcounts altogether. (And the current forum software does allow me to remove them from convenient view. You can probably configure your own profile so you don't have to look at anyone's postcount too if you want.) I've participated in close-knit communities where postcount was only a distraction but I don't think we're that far in the other direction.

[JeffT]

Sorry about the not-staying-logged-in issue. This is because we have two URLs, "kumoricon.com/forums" and "kumoricon.org/forums". When you switch between using one and the other, you lose your session and you don't appear logged in until you create a login session using the new URL.

The forums "live" on .com, and are mirrored over to .org. This isn't a problem except that the server setting for the forum for which URL it will use when you initiate a session only permits one URL.

Anyway, the reason this issue started to reappear is because we mixed up the URLs in that setting. It's fixed now. Use .com and you'll be fine.

Correction: You should use .org. You might have a problem if you use .com. We've also now changed the Forums link on the front page to always point to the forums with .org, regardless of whether you arrived at the main kumoricon site using .com or .org. This is all because the official URL is www.kumoricon.org but .com mirrors it.

If you have any problems, try only using .org, and logging out completely and logging back in, and if that still doesn't work, we'll keep looking into the issue.

[superjaz]

^ i concur, easy for me to say because i have a high post count but i have also been a member of the forums for years now and thats why i have a high post count not cuz of spam if you look at my demos its pretty well spaced out over posts (with a fair chunk to spam)
it was a little anyoing to see my listing getting bumped down because of spamers and not real posts
***edit as i just have noticed the spam posts subtrated from the total forum post count, i thought mr stash was just talking about posts in spam area not counting***
HA! wait is that mean ..? my bad  ..HA!
i is # 3 again i is #3again woot me i rock yay me
neko is queen again
heehhehee ah...

[leashy]

I would like to lodge a formal complaint against taking away our Spam post count. I know that being a spammer has about the same effect as being a /b/er but I liked having a high post count! I think that a post count should reflect how much time you put into the forums, even if it is just spam. I've gotten to know many of the con goes from the spam thread. And we've all become good friends!

*Puppy Dog Eyes* So please... *sniff* give me back my post count...

Spam is fun but spam is also spam. The spam forum is there to be crazy and have fun, but if the postcounts are to mean anything they should not show how big of a spammer a person is. That makes the postcount metric meaningless (if any meaning could have been drawn from it at all.) I realize there are all sorts of problems with using postcount to measure anything but the postcount should ideally be an indicator of how valuable of a contributor a member is, and postcount should be a badge of pride for those whose high postcounts reflect their significant and valuable contributions to the community through the forums. Artificially inflating your postcount through spamming, of course, detracts from the reward postcount provides to those contributors.

Maybe there's no point in attempting to measure anything with postcounts because of all the inherent inaccuracies, but I'd rather try at least rather than banish postcounts altogether. (And the current forum software does allow me to remove them from convenient view. You can probably configure your own profile so you don't have to look at anyone's postcount too if you want.) I've participated in close-knit communities where postcount was only a distraction but I don't think we're that far in the other direction.

I think this is a FANTASTIC thing honestly!  I agree that post count in a way is a measure of how valuable someone is the the forums and when I would recieve IMs from people who have been here a month bragging about how they passed my post count (of course all in the Spam section) it was frustrating.  I mean it is great for someone to post and get to know people but we want people to contribute more than  "look at my lolcats!"  I also feel that if someone wants to show that they mean more, this will really force them to search out other aspects of the forums and expand themselves to make an impact in their post count.

[Lit_of_Fey]

haha I agree with the above ^^^

it should also stop all the frustrating post ninja-ing. God I hate that >:\

Whee anyways this new forum thing is great, it reminds  me of the matrix for some reason. I should post something significant.

I can't think of anything, darn :c I guess I'm a spammer at heart as well. I MUST REFORM!!! *runs away*

[Kimiski]

So posting in SPAM doesnt count twoard your rank?
That kinda kills the fun... 

What my old rank still hasnt been fixed, I have more than Mustach and he had at least 1,000 more than me.
Or did you take away old spam posts from it?

[guspasho]

Spam no longer counts toward the postcount, and due to excessive spamming from some, this has been applied retroactively.

[JeffT]

Tonight, sometime probably shortly after midnight, the main web site (but not the forums) will be going down briefly for software updates--hopefully for less than a half hour, but possibly longer.

[JeffT]

Tonight, sometime probably shortly after midnight, the main web site (but not the forums) will be going down briefly for software updates--hopefully for less than a half hour, but possibly longer.

The web site is back up after a successful software update. It was down for about 10 minutes.

[Antares]

OOOH! There is a LINK to KUMORICON.ORG up there now!!! ^___^