I've basically bitten the bullet, and I'm working to port the forum to a modern framework (Laravel), with a modern frontend in Blade using TypeScript.
I'm going to be working on this over the next few weeks, and I'll let you know how I get on. The main thing is to get password resets and registrations going as quickly as possible, because that's the number one reason why access to the forums has been going down fast - people lose access to their accounts, and there's no obvious way to get them back and registration doesn't work since at least PHP 7 days.
thanks,
Andrew
vanderaj ·
I want to give the forum a modern look and feel. The icon sets we have are really ancient and outdated, and the underlying DHTML is first generation dynamic HTML from the late 1990's, so I really want that to be polished, responsive, and mobile friendly.
My main goal is to bring as much of your old settings and data as possible into the new code, even if the new code doesn't show anything right now. For example, things like posts per page may not be implemented in the new forum if we end up with infinity scrolling or better pagination, but I still want your preferences kept unless we're definitely not keeping that setting.
That said, not every single feature of the old board will be supported. About 20% of the functionality is used by most users. Rarely used features like notepads will disappear. Theming on day 1 is unlikely to be a thing, so I will make sure there's a light, system and dark mode, but theming and internationalization might take a hot minute to implement, if ever. Profile options like Yahoo messenger ID, Aim, MSN, and ICQ will be removed. As the main place for discussion has been Facebook, I will add a link to your Facebook Profile. If you have other discussion platforms you'd like to be listed, let me know.
So far, the work has identified:
- 29,000 spam accounts (I've deleted them from production, too)
- 120,000+ dead images from ~ 4900 old image hosts that don't exist any more... again, most likely images from spammers, so they will be deleted and not migrated forward. This is because there's nothing to migrate - the image host is dead, the image is gone. The images stored in our attachments tables will continue to work
- A new BBCode interpreter using modern BBCode syntax will be used; the migration script will try to migrate as much old XMB style BBCode into the new century, but some of it will break. There's a 0% chance I will maintain a custom BBcode interpreter. There lie dragons and who wants unknown dragons?
vanderaj ·
This is what it looks like at the moment. It's very plain jane, but it's working - as you can see it's showing real production data on my local development environment. The database is actually Postgres (not MySQL). I'll keep you informed and let you know when it's ready for a test drive.
Yogie ·
I don't know what half of that means 🤪 but thanks for updating things Andrew.
vanderaj ·
I've implemented a modern responsive look and feel, with light, dark, and follow system modes, using visual metaphors that you're likely to already know from social media sites. It also works properly on phones.
vanderaj ·
Mobile view
vanderaj ·
It now allows you to attach up to three images per post.
agonza ·
very nice . progressing well mate.
beetleboyjeff ·
Thank you Andrew.
hulbyw ·
Many thanks for all your work Andrew
vanderaj ·
And we're using the new forum software. Please report any issues.
The main one I've found so far is that links to old posts don't seem to work, I'll try to chase that down.