Plunging headlong into eternal darkness, aka: forum update (1 Viewer)

mjp

Founding member
Some time this weekend I intend to update the forum to a new version. That usually takes about 10 minutes, and nothing much changes, but that won't be the case this time.

The upgrade is major, they have pretty much rebuilt the forum from the ground up so a lot has changed. Part of that change is the way the layout is managed. I have been able to approximate the current layout, but like I said, a lot has changed, so it's going to feel weird around here for a while.

Feature-wise there isn't much reason to update, but at some point I have to, or we'll eventually be orphaned in some outdated shit here, and no one wants that. The longer I wait, the more disruptive the change will be.

So, yeah.
What?
I dunno.

I don't know how long it will take to do the update, but just to let you know, there is a distinct possibility that it could all go horribly wrong and become what the kids call an epic clusterfuck. In which case I will try to be prepared to revert and retreat. We'll see. If the update goes smoothly and we reopen with the new version, there's no going back. So say your goodbyes now. I don't want to see any tears in the new place, staining the rugs and whatnot.
 
sweet. maybe I'll get a new hairdo. finger waves, maybe. jesus, too many choices!
 
as long as we don;t get rid if that "new posts" link up top... i would be lost trying to go through thousands of threads without that feature.

bill
 
There will be two tabs at the top, one is for new posts.

The database works the same way, marking the threads you've visited as read. That won't change.
 
mjp has been working with this new forum update for quite a while now (he's been giving hank solo and I a few sneak peeks). from what I can tell it's been a fairly arduous and frustrating task.

he's just trying to maintain his street cred by taking the no big thang pose. bastard's working like crazy behind the scenes.

that's why I want to make sure my hair is perfect. mjp deserves it for all his hard work.

heh.
 
I hope the guys don't get mad at me for posting this, but some of us have actually had matching track suits for a while. We just didn't tell everyone about it.

Here's a pic taken last summer. Left to right: chronic, mjp, jordan, me, hoochmonkey, and Purple Stickpin.

And yes, my hands are exactly where you think they are.

Team Buknet.jpg
 
If you take away my user CP my blackouts will take over and I will not know what threads I have participated in. (Not that it would be a tragedy, but... for me, anyway.)

I feel red carpeting would be better, however; I'm feeling like the simulcast layout in downtown Albany.
 
The weeklong shutdown was a textbook example of Murphy's law. The database hardly ever becomes corrupted like that. But what better time to do it than the day I disconnect for nine days? It makes perfect sense.

This won't be like that. Worst case scenario is it's down for a few hours and comes back just the way it is now. Best case scenario is the update takes about an hour and we all blast happily into an uncertain future.
 
Hopefully this all works out.

mjp - Sorry you have to be stuck fiddling with dials and switches in your white lab coat while the rest of us are grilling dogs and burgers, playing frisbee, and sipping beverages this holiday weekend. In memoriam of Gary Coleman, of course.

See you on the other side.
And seriously, thanks for all the hard work.
 
We are entertaining J&J Chance tonight. And by entertaining, I mean pushing drinks at them and letting them do all the talking.
 
I'm nervously waiting for the update and hope it all works out well.

MJP, thanks for all the hard work you put into this one and only Bukowski forum.

It must be a quarter past seven AM in La, when is the master going to push the magic button and we all wake up in wonderland?
 
wait! before the switch is flicked, someone recite the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry IV! quick!

fuck it, let do it...
 
no, just honesty.

The stupid BIGNESS of the symbols and the fonts, like if we were little children. Like the stupid comic-layout on recent operating systems. It's not mjps fault, it's just how screens are designed these times. I hate it.
And this wiiiiide screen minus the menu to the left. How will we tell newbies about the poem-database now? And the superfunny blubs to mark quotations! ARRRRGGH!
 
The stupid BIGNESS of the symbols and the fonts, like if we were little children. Like the stupid comic-layout on recent operating systems.
The fonts should all be the same size. What's bigger?

The icons may or may not be reworked (and some made smaller). But the longer I run this forum software, the less I'm inclined to customize it, because every customization is a future headache.

How long did the update take? it looks like it went quickly.
About 60 hours before yesterday, and 2.5 hours yesterday. Yesterday would have been faster but my upload/download speeds were shit all night.

If 60 hours sounds like an exaggeration, Imagine you've been typing away happily on DOS or in notepad for years and then someone drops the latest MS Office or Open Office in your lap and says, "Here's how you're going to do everything now. Have fun." The forum layout tools are that different. The management side, configuring the forums, dealing with users - all the nuts and bolts stuff - that hasn't really changed. But everything else has.

I think it kind of sucks too Roni, but it's as close to the old layout as I could make it. Like the other thread says, there is still a lot of tweaking to do. I could have stuck with the old version, a lot of people are, but we would have eventually been left behind, and you know how fast everything moves now. It doesn't take long for this kind of stuff to really show its age.
 
too bad you didn't bring your smurf collection. we could have had even more fun, if that was actually possible.
 
too bad you didn't bring your smurf collection. we could have had even more fun, if that was actually possible.

funny you should mention the smurfs, since we thought they were lost! i left them at my parents' house when i moved here, and i was going to bring them back from our visit there in may but nobody could find them. of course they were discovered after we left.
 
of course you had to change things some day and of course you did a splendid job in letting it look as close to the original as poss!
It's just ... new, you know.


The fonts should all be the same size. What's bigger?

I dunno. It just SEEMS to be bigger.
At least some of the symbols Are.

I have a sick habbit of opening my IE-window full size even though I have a 17"wide-screen-notebook. Maybe that's the cause.

At least the field in which I'm typing now goes from left-end to right-end now and is not a centered 'box' with a FIX size anymore. And since the menu to the left is gone, the WHOLE thing looks much wider now. Also the empty spaces between symbols, fields etc seem unusual big to me. All the boxes seem bigger. I guess it's just my gut feeling because I was so overwhelmed when I first saw it. Unfortunately I don't think I have a screenshot of the older layout to make a valid direct comparison.

Aww, just forget about my stupid complaints, baby. You do a more than fine job here!
You know that.

big-comic-symbols_and_big-empty-space.gif


bigness-and-comic-symbols_fullscreenshot2.gif
 
I have a sick habbit of opening my IE-window full size even though I have a 17"wide-screen-notebook. Maybe that's the cause.

At least the field in which I'm typing now goes from left-end to right-end now and is not a centered 'box' with a FIX size anymore. And since the menu to the left is gone, the WHOLE thing looks much wider now. Also the empty spaces between symbols, fields etc seem unusual big to me. All the boxes seem bigger.
The width can be static - meaning it won't expand out to the edges even in a big browser window - but doing that creates problems with the left side navigation on the main and forum list pages. When you move that navigation away from the edge of the browser it looks all fucked up. It isn't designed to float in the left third of the page.

A lot of the changes they made to the forum software were to bring the code more in line with modern standards. So they got rid of things like tables, which were never intended to be a page formatting tool but became one because back in the day we had no other ways to control columns. Anyway, the old table layout is what made it so easy to insert the navigation and control every aspect of the layout. The new CSS standards are much more slippery, and add to that the fact that some browsers (okay, only that festering piece of shit IE) have a different idea of what the CSS standards are, and you've got headaches.

I can do CSS from scratch, and I could edit some of the forum files to make it obey me, but the forum has a back-end interface that gives you pretty extensive control without editing any files. Editing the files introduces a whole other level of headaches that I would prefer to avoid. So I'm stuck with what can be done through the interface, and trying to keep some design elements intact so the forum more or less blends in with the rest of the site. That meant a lot of compromises, and the inability to make it really match the old layout. It would have been a lot easier to leave the layout as it is by default and just change the dull blue colors to gray. But that really looked shitty to me, so here we are. Somewhere in the middle.

But a year from now I doubt any of these changes will have mattered much. It's just a matter of getting used to it. You know, right before they change it again.

And I'll continue to make little changes here and there over time. I was always changing little things in the other forum, but you probably didn't even notice most of them. The point is it took a while to get the old one "perfected," and it will take a while to make this into something as well.
 

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