Legion World Forums LEGION WORLD Science Police Headquarters We've Moved!

As most of you know, I had posted about our changing forum software a few weeks ago. I did end up setting us up with the new software, but I'm unhappy with the look and feel of it and some of the options available. So I'm considering going a different route that's more like the software we are currently using. As a result, I'll need to close these boards for a day or two to (hopefully) successfully transition the members, topics, posts, etc.

(I closed up by accident...just trying something out).

Ugh...You'll have to log in to the VB forums using your displayed name and not your log in name.

And we've moved. Still a lot of work to be done, but this is basically going to be the new Legion World message board from here o out.

Okay, so apparently the ability of non-admins to post was not turned on.

I think it should be working now.

Okay, so apparently I had to reset each forum individually. But *now* I think the permissions are right on everything.

I thought I did all of that...sorry.

For the record, I'm definitely liking this a lot better than the *other* new board!

It's still a work in progress, but yeah...vbulletin has made me appreciate this software more.

Could be worse. At least (before the permissions were fixed) I hunted down and un/repinned all the sticky topics that had gone invisible to make them show up

[No, I'm not joking]

Incidentally, here's the CSS code I'm using to make a few things more like the old board if it helps:

Right, it's hacky, but...

Add


to the main CSS file.

Then in the HTML code for the forum list page itself, add


Since that's read later in the process, it will override the display:none.

Actually, I'm going to be giving each forum it's own style, so I'll just add that bit to that style and leave this one alone.

Fair enough

One other suggestion - could you brighten the yellow up on the new-posts L? The red/blue borders are less prominent with the new version, so it'd make them stand out more:

Like this:

Okay, something mildly concerning. I was going through the 21CL Roll Call thread, changing links to point to the new board, and came across one post that's not come through at all - it's showing (including on the edit page) as completely blank. Here's the counterpart on the original board, for comparison.

In this case, I can restore it manually, obviously. I'm just wondering how many posts are like that...

Still playing around - if you add


Then Firefox will make the underline the same colour as the link text, rather than the default link colour.

Could have been one of the stopping points, where I had to restart the process. So, if these exist then Spaceoploy will be filled with them. The old boards will be up for awhile (I'm turning off PMs, though), so any mods can transfer stuff like this over.

Took about five times to get to the site using copy and paste. when it didn't work, I typed in the address starting with the www and ending before the "]".

Just noticed that any image wider than 400px is getting scrunched down via CSS. Is that deliberate, or a default setting?

[Oh, and any image posted with the [thumb] tag hack isn't showing, but you may have expected that one.]

I just tweaked the "Can Read Topics" permission to enable for "Guests" as well.

I assume we didn't want to have an uprising among the lurking class.

Seems that clicking on a link to another thread while you're logged on will necessitate logging on again before you can post to the linked thread. However, jumping around from thread to thread normally doesn't show any issues.

Still, am loving the new look and the speed at which you guys are tidying up! Awesome, and thanks for the hard work

Glad I can post again. It took me a few minutes to figure how to get here from the old site from my iPhone, I'm finally logged in.

File manager isn't working - I wanted to upload something in Bits there, and it tells me " File Manager: You can attach 1 files. Max. file size is 0 Bytes." And the 0 Bytes part is entirely literal. And trying to upload an image in Holo-Vids causes it to tell me that "We encountered a problem. The reason reported was: You have exceeded your limit of attachments."

And the Last Posts island on the forum list page isn't updating at all - the last post there is from 16 hours ago just now.

Not that it's a big deal, but everyone's member number has been increased by 1. I'm now Member #5.

The Last Posts issue is probably the same bug that affected the shoutbox...it's being generated externally and apparently that technology hasn't been perfected yet with this software. I'll have to consider other options.

I haven't really looked at/played with the attachments yet. Will figure that out when I can. Probably have to test with my Beast Boy account.



Member #1 is now the message board or something...I was demoted to #2 which of course affects everyone else.

This may be another flavor of the bug referenced above, but the "Popular Topics" box on the front page doesn't seem to accurately reflect the "Views" count - instead just showing the number of posts in those particular threads.

I don't know if the "views" numbers will be accurate until after the new message board is established. The old software never recorded that information, so posts is what it's based on now.

Can you tweak the PM and Active Topics pages to use the LSH board skin or somesuch? It's a bit cramped with the sidebars there.

*speaking of cramped, added body{line-height:1.3} to his CSS file. The lines seem a bit tight on the new board and I can't see why... Also div.small, div.small a{font-weight:bold;text-decoration:none !important} to make page links on the thread pages bold and non-underlined and reduce visual clutter a tad*

And got to ask, since it's been bugging me - why make Spaceopoly a subforum of Anywhere? LLtL, VoT, E10Y and Titans are all obvious subfora, but Spaceopoly's a thing in itself that's never really been connected to Anywhere.

EDIT: Something else else else I just noticed - all the old spoiler tags are broken. They all look like this:
Click Here For A SpoilerDon't tell anyone...

Since most of the old spoilers are probably now not-spoilers-any-more, you could maybe just hide "Click Here For A Spoiler" with .spoiler_wording{display:none} .spoiler_text{background:none}

And doesn't work either

Spoiler was a hack...and will be a hack here to. Haven't gotten to fixing it yet. Not sure that all existing spoilers will be able to be fixed either.

I'm still working through all of this (with a full-time job), so again your patience is appreciated.

Oh, and Spaceopoly was because I wanted each of the main forums to have a sub-forum...Space was a later add and fits under the Anywhere umbrella in my mind.

No, I wasn't expecting you to get to everything straight away . Just letting you know.

[Still don't get the idea that all the fora must have a subforum, or that Spaceopoly should be a subforum, tho. And even if it did have to be, it's closer to MMB than Anywhere for me.]

You'll always be Number 1. (I hope with this blatant kissing up, Nightcrawler will double my Legion World salary)

Thanks! BTW, Spoiler tags are a part of the new board. Unfortunately, no spoiler tags that were imported can be converted automatically.

OK, this is an difficult observation to try to explain... but, here goes:



Any posts that were imported from the old board that used "chevron" brackets (the "less than" or "greater than" symbols) to enclose text, caused the contained text to not show up in the post. But... there are exceptions:

- Basically, if the text started with an opening chevron, " < " and then immediately was followed by another character (i.e. no space) whatever was typed up until the closing chevron, " > " does not appear...

- Unless, somewhere in the text string, either a normal bracket - or a hard return - occurs, at which point all text after will be visible (at least until another opening chevron).

- If a space follows the opening chevron, no problem.



Now... all that being said:

- Any new posts don't seem to have this problem and

- If an existing post does demonstrate it, any edit - regardless of whether it is even to the "chevroned" part of the post - will fix it.



I know this seems like a very specific problem, but it's very widespread, because "chevroning" text is the standard nomenclature for non-spoken action during roleplay threads.



Here's a page with some good examples of what I'm talking about:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=344687&page=182

The second post on that page, #344687, is the one I edited, but all the others on that page demonstrate the strange "gapping" resulting from this (you can see the intended posts along with all the missing text by stepping into edit mode).



Anyway... not the end of the world, but I just didn't know if this were something simple that a clean-up script could address.

Basically, the import treated <text> as HTML tags - a good thing, because any old font/colour/size tags were rendered as HTML in the import, and all of THEM would break if things had been treated any differently (i.e., you'd have posts filled with the likes of "<font style="font-size:14px">text</font s>" as with the vBulletin import).

If you edit/resave a post, it then treats the text literally (i.e., not as HTML) by default, which is why it "fixes" it, or you can change to either *asterisks* or ‹single›/«double» guillemets in the process to prevent the same thing happening next upgrade.

There's no real way to fix the one globally without breaking the other, I suspect.

Incidentally, there's a related bug I found earlier where if you post non-Latin characters it converts them to HTML entities... but unless you enable HTML in the post, it then renders the HTML entities literally and you end up with the likes of this: &#1058;&#1080;&#1082;&#1095;&#1080;&#1082; &#1070;&#1083;&#1080;&#1105;&#1074;&#1080;&#1095; &#1052;&#1080;&#1088;&#1072;&#1079;.

There is no clean up script like there was with VBulletin...which is not a bad thing as that one wasn't all that great either.

At this point, what was ported over automatically, was ported over.

Any changes desired regarding old posts will need to be done manually. And it's better practice to avoid using characters in posts in general.

Also, please feel free to offer suggestions, just please know that I'm not happy with everything either and will be changing things as time goes by.

Thanks, guys... that's sort of what I feared, but was somehow hoping there was a quick fix.


I did the cleanup on the RP threads this morning back to about November (just killing time in a conference call. )


It actually wasn't that bad, as it turns out only about 3 or 4 posters actually use the "chevroning" but, yeah - going forward - bad idea!

How soon before we can redirect legionworld.net here, instead of the archived board? It's not a big deal to take the extra steps, but I imagine you'll want that link to bring people directly in soon.

Quite. Cobalt was doing something similar in 21CL to indicate telepathy (I always used double-guillemets, which are basically French quotation marks, for telepathy), and one of the things I PMed him about [if he ever checks it!] was to ask if he'd rather fix it himself.


Incidentally, about the homepage - the letterboxing bug was never fixed. Open http://legionworld.net/ in Chrome and you get a tiny little slot to see the site in, and I just checked with Opera... where you see absolutely nothing of the site at all, just the outer frames.



*would just redirect the homepage straight to the forum and be done with it*

Could you switch http://www.legionworld.net/forums/images/general/default_dark/newpm.gif for , please? They're identical except for the fact that I switched the layers around so that this version defaults to showing rather than hiding the image when animations are disabled, as they are in Opera Mini.

It's been redirected since a day or so after the move. Is there a link there that I missed?



I have plans for that page.

Er... so what the deal with the "Leave a comment" option on someone's profile? Are they basically like non-private messages?

If I put legionworld.net into my browser, I end up on the splash page. Clicking in the "message boards" link brings you to the old boards, and then clicking on the "We've Moved" link brings you here.

-thanks

Hmmm... that's bizarre. I just followed exactly what you said, Dave, and both "Message Board" links on the front page brought me directly here - the upper left one to the main forum page, and the red "Omnicom button" one to a frames version.

This might be a silly question (and I don't know why it would maybe hold an old version of the front page) but did you try clearing your cache and temp files on your computer?

Yes.

Names have got a wee bit small after the last update, and if you have avatars off (as I usually do), there's a big gap between name and title (previously it looked like "Before" without the avatar below - or, notwithstanding the mod name colours here, like the UBB.classic example)

Yeah, it was Firefox holding onto the page (on both work and home computers). Hitting refresh in the browser actually cleared it up. Sorry, my bad.

Apparently another feature forum software decided to adopt from social networks.

Ok. So, we were closed down for several hours tonight due to fixing the THUMB, THUMB3 and THUMB4 tags. They should all be working now and in the future.

Could you fix the CSS* that limits images to 400px wide too, please, at least by increasing it to (say) 750px? Right now, if you post an [img], it's equivalent to posting a [thumb4] without the chance to click-through.

*It's at the bottom of the board HTML's <head> section, not in the CSS files:

Done. Sorry, didn't realize that was happening.

Added a few more media codes to the UBBCodes. You can see the list on the full reply form. The notable ones are the ability to search the Legion and LMB Wikis.

Cosmic Boy at Legionwiki.com and

Nightcrawler at the LMB Wiki.



Maybe people will want to help fill those sites out more.

Freaking sweet, Nighty!

That's the best kind of present - the one you didn't even know you wanted... but totally love when you get it.

Seems like the "search" function doesn't work as well here as it did in the old place. Tonight, I had to link to an Old LW post in a reply here because I couldn't find what I was looking for here. Anyone having similar problems?

The search technology isn't as good in PHP (new board software) as it was in Perl (old board software). But I wouldn't purposely link to old board posts as they will be going away sooner than later.

The whole point of this change was to free up the disk space that the old board is clogging up.

Understood, Nighty. Just pointing out in case it wasn't known.

Even after I found the exact title of the thread I was looking for on the old board, there were like a zillion pages of matches on the search results. I'll just have to trial-and-error searching on the new board.

Fixed the link to this board.

I think the search is one of the things to be fixed in the next update of the software. Let's hope it's better than it is now.

For what it's worth, I actually think it's kind of nice that it will give you every post in a thread with a certain search term rather than just the first post in a thread that has that term. I always had problems finding specific posts on the old board because of that (particularly in longer threads, like game threads).

I don't like the fact that the default setting is to search for posts newer than a week, though, as I usually have to remember to change that.

*Agrees with EDE, although an option to search for threads rather than posts would be nice*

There's some stuff that's been showing up - the ™ & © symbols in the footer show up as "â„¢ & ©" for instance, and the é in "Café Cramer" shows up similarly weirdly. I just realised why. In the header, there's a call for (basically) ASCII character coding:


As it stands, those bits are Unicode (UTF-8) encoded, not ASCII (ISO 8859-1) encoded. (Something else else similar would happen in reverse with existing ASCII text if the encoding was just switched to UTF-8, unfortunately)

I thought we were UTF-8 encoded before. I've switched us back.

I just checked - the old board is ISO 8859-1 too:


[I suspect the import script may have converted everything to UTF-8.]

Still, my post above, hard-encoded by the board as ISO 8859-1, now has �s in place of the e-acutes, let's see if é works in new posts...

EDIT: Yup.

PS:
would make the location/reg date bit at the bottom of the posts a bit more like the old board. Can't separate the labels from the fields, bolding-wise, as it stands, nor add the <hr style="color:#000000" size="1"> above - that'd require manual editing.

Sorry, the downtime (errors) this weekend were my mistake as I changed the board's Collation (encoding as Reboot mentions) without realizing it would be a problem.

No worries! We all had to go find a book to read! You're helping us grow as individuals!

Main thing is, it's working now

Just one thing - the conversion to HTML entities which don't render is still happening, even though the board is now set to Unicode UTF-8, since I can't write "M&#7841;nh C&#7889;i Xoàn" in 21st Century Legion without, well, you see (Vietnamese character's name, the diacritics change the word entirely. I've also got a few words of Russian in Cyrillic characters from the Russian characters/their names which are similarly non-rendering); which didn't happen on the old board.

Repairs weren't working until I restored the character set to iso-8859-1. It shouldn't be UTF-8 anymore.

Ah. Well, I could (and did) still post them on the old board, also set to ISO-8859-1, without this happening (see this post there, sentence starting "Dani took another large drink from her beer glass" for an example of it rendering properly, and its counterpart on the current board where the a-dot and grave+circumflex-o are turned into entities that proceed to not-render since the ampersand is itself turned into entity &amp;, leaving (e.g.) &amp;#7841;, which renders as &#7841;).

Okay, so how do I upload images?

I just did the covers on the solicits thread as off-site links, so they need to be fixed.

It's only enabled in Bits right now

I've added the ability to upload in the other forums as well. See File Manager under the Full Reply Form.

*Partial* fix for some stuff that went wonky after the last update. Can't seem to fix everything, although the CSS is really clunky, with stuff like <a href="">s inside <span class="">es rather than just <a href="" class="">

The styles themselves weren't touched, the only stuff screwed up were my hard-coded changes which it sounds like most of these styles would effect.

I'll take a look when I have a chance.

Basically, that changes the "recent posts" back to alternating blue/grey rows rather than all-blue, boosts the size of the top-left-of-post name back from small, bolds the Location/etc line at the bottom of posts and gets rid of the underlining of mods' titles (like Ex's "Ready Steady Go!").

More or less everything else, you'll need to (re)hardcode.

This has happened again with the upgrade to 7.6. Example: http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=923769#Post923769