Forum upgrade

[Firejack]

This weekend I'm upgrading the forum software from phpBB2 to phpBB3. I have tested the upgrade and it worked fine. There are likely to be one or 2 issues though.
The obvious couple being the forum theme will be the new default theme for phpBB3 as the other themes will need to be redesigned to work with phpBB3. Feel free to design any of your own as it would be nice to have a choice of designs.
The other major difference is I'm streamlining the usergroups. Unfortunately whichever way I do this its messy so I've decided the easiest thing to do is reset the usergroups meaning people will need to reapply to their usergroups. All the divisional usergroups (Starwolf, MAP, Nemetos, Beltain etc) are being merged into the "Community Member" Usergroup. So apply to that if your group disappears.

You can message me on Xfire while the forums are being upgraded or you have any problems.

[Conri]

The other major difference is I'm streamlining the usergroups

All the divisional usergroups (Starwolf, MAP, Nemetos, Beltain etc) are being merged into the "Community Member" Usergroup. So apply to that if your group disappears.

Any chance of an explanation for a pretty big change (and a pretty big back-peddle on a previous decision)

[Firejack]

The permission system has changed greatly. There are many more options and you can really configure just about anything you could ever want to do on the forums.
One change that is really useful is you can now set multiple group leaders to each group with moderation rights over that group. So now we can have all the divisional leaders as group leaders for the "Community Member" group so when a new member joins the divisional leader will be able to give them access to the rest of the forums by adding them to the one group instead of each divisional leader having to add users for their own group and myself needing to keep updating each group individually each time a change is made to the forums.
I was hoping for a system of inheritance. Whereby a child group could be placed with others in a parent group and each of the child groups would get the same access rights as the parent group. This way works just as well though. With the exception if we ever needed to E-mail a block of users it would be a tricky process to target the Email at say just the EVE online players.

[Conri]

So - As a result Nemetos Order forum will be viewable and postable by the entire community?

[Firejack]

Yes. But don't tell Killer

The NO Officers one will remain hidden. I sense an all out rebellion if I changed that. The NO Officers forum will be the only hidden one though. Admin forum is becoming viewable also.

[Callie]

Sweet, finally i get to read and post in NO forums again

Also i get to see what the admins talk about..all the dirty little secrets u have in there

BTW, will the postcount be reseted or will it be unchanged? <--- most important question so far.

[Firejack]

It will be unchanged for now. Really want to replace postcounts with a reputation/karma mod though. Just can't find one I like..

[Callie]

So the more post the higher karma/rep or what?
And maybe u could put in some new ranks in that case to..just to make it a bit funnier.

[Conri]

Basically Karma is a value attached to your posts.

So, the more posts you get where other people rate up your posts, the higher karma value.

In short, the more useful, funny, or insightful posts you make, the higher your karma. the more pointless, insulting, or ridiculous posts you make, the lower your karma

[Tzar]

Bye Callie!

[Callie]

Meh, i don´t believe in karma anyway so..i just think shi t happens in life, nothing u can do about it.

And fj love me to much to remove me anyway..im the one keeping the forums alive
Think how dead they should be with all my important posting here.

Btw fj, how long will the update take and will the forums be down for some time or what?

[Firejack]

The forums took about 30 minutes to setup and an hour and a half to upgrade. My poor Athlon XP 2500+ didn't know what hit it. I wasn't expecting the database upgrade to take as long as it did. The web server is much faster though so I reckon it will be done in under an hour. The thing which takes the time is the reconfiguration of the forum after its been upgraded. Removing all the permissions and setting up new groups is probably going to take an hour. Then another hours to do all the other fixes I noted down before in the Admin forum.

All of Saturday afternoon while I'm listening to the Liverpool game on the radio and maybe into the early evening is looking most likely. 4 hours in total perhaps.

[Callie]

Okay, hope i can survive that long with out the forums

And its pretty creepy that u answer a question on the forums directed to u or post a answer when someone says your name somewhere so fast.
Tell us the truth, u do have a secret spy program that is searching every single post here on the forums after FJ or Firejack and when it finds a new post there, it will alert u.
Thats why u can answer so fast..im on to u.
And i dont believe u read every single thread

[Firejack]

This is my homepage. Everytime I look for something on the Internet I check for new posts here first. Quite often I end up reading something on the forums and completely forgetting why I came online. Perhaps I should change my homepage to Google or something

We might be able to add notifications via the Open Source Jabber IM protocol for the forums. That would be kind of cool because we could integrate the forums, chat room and Instant Messenger into the same system.

[Theodora]

shame there's no way to intergrate with xfire as it's pretty much the only IM client i sue these days, i only log onto another when i'm planning to talk to someone about something i've rpe arranged