Server/Software Upgrades

Ted · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 1:46 am

Sorry for the downtime today. One of the things on our list of items to handle over the holiday week was moving some infrastructure to a new server, so we've been hacking away it for the past couple of days.

Server

Our original linode server was running an ancient version of Debian that was getting very difficult to maintain or install new software. So, we wanted to get onto the latest version of Ubuntu Server (10.10) so that things were easier going forward. With that, we've also modified a few things in the infrastructure. We've moved from php-fcgi & apache2 to php-fpm (5.3.3) & nginx. This configuration gives us a decent performance boost, which we've been kind of needing lately. Web1 (our main website, wiki, forum server) has been pushed pretty hard lately, so this should buy us some time until we need to cluster all of our properties among multiple servers. While it's possible, it becomes a config and admin nightmare, and I'm not quite ready to tackle it yet.

Forum

This is probably the most significant change as far as our users are concerned. We've decided to move over to phpBB 3 instead of the SMF 1.x we've been using for years. The fact of the matter is that SMF seems like an almost dead project, and hasn't been doing anything to combat spam. 2.0 has been in development for years (sound familiar? *grin*) and 1.x has only been security releases. Because spam and fake accounts have become such a major problem for us, we needed to look at what forums will allow us to put more checks into place, and phpBB was doing that. Plus, they had mods to allow us to do all the things we did before with SMF, so we went with it.

That being said, there are a few issues.

1. Some attachements did not copy over. Some did. We're not sure why this was, but we didn't go crazy trying to figure it out. All new attachements should work, and it seems like a majority of the old ones did as well.
2. If you used a Gravatar for your forum avatar, you'll have to go into your User Preferences and enable it again. The converter didn't handle that (since it was a mod on both forums).
3. Karma didn't make it over. We're sorry about that.
4. We'll be working on a new theme in the next few days. Unfortunately, forum software doesn't make it easy to modify the theme AND use mods. Since we've already had a few mods installed, we didn't want to make it worse. We need to figure out the *right* way to do it, so we're going to take our time and roll it out cleanly.
5. There will most likely be permissions issues, etc.

Wiki

Mediawiki was updated to the latest release. There's a slight bug in the plugin that shows the languages across the top. You also can't login, since we need to fix the auth to point to phpBB now. I'll fix that over the next day or two. Otherwise, it was a fairly painless upgrade, even though it hadn't been upgraded in almost 4 years... (yikes!)

Themes Site

No real changes except that it was upgraded to the latest CMSMS release. Yes, it still needs some work. It's nothing we don't already know.

Main Site

We'll move the main site over tomorrow. There are few gotchas with it, including our ad serving platform, the pastebin, and the plugin to show the latest posts on the forum that all need to migrate as well. Plus, we want to make sure we don't break the module downloading piece at the same time. It's all doable, but it's already almost 9 pm on New Years Eve, so it was time to just cut a line and figure it the remaining issues afterwards.

--

If you find any other issues with these items, please let us know in this thread so we can try and fix them asap.

Happy New Year!

frankmanl · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 10:53 am

First of all, happy New Year Ted, all other devteam members and all the rest of our community!

I took a quick look on the items you mentioned.

FORUM
If you indeed are going to work on the theme, as far as I'm concerned it would be really helpful to make a better visual difference between boards containing read or unread topics. As far as I can see the boards containing unread topics are now given a different color, however (due to my slight color blindess) it's hard to recognize that.

Oh, and what is the meaning of the topic icons? Is there a place where they are explained? I could not find it...

WIKI
No problems logging in!

That's all.
Keep up the good work.

Frank

RonnyK · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 11:23 am

Hi Frank,

the assumption you make is correct. You can see that as well when you hover the icons. The message about read/unread will show then as well..
When you click the 'view unread posts' on top of the boards, then a list with ONLY the red-ones will show.

Ronny

Sonya · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 12:22 pm

I do not know if it is a right place to add remarks to new forum software. I like phpBB much more than SMF, however, it's awful for me that the old links do not work any more. It seems like if anyone had pointed to another thread that included solution, the link will not be rewritten and thus the solution cannot be quickly found

.

Ted wrote:

1. Some attachements did not copy over. Some did. We're not sure why this was, but we didn't go crazy trying to figure it out. All new attachements should work, and it seems like a majority of the old ones did as well.

The extension txt has been deactivated and can no longer be displayed. Any reason for not allowing .txt attachments?

frankmanl · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 1:03 pm

Concerning the WIKI
Yesterday I did quite a lot of work on the dutch WIKI pages.
It seems that is all gone...

Is there a way to recover that?
Not only I edited pages, I also uploaded images which are now not available.
Today I edited a page (Wiki/guidelines/nl) and saw prove of it, but these changes are now gone too.
Last changes I can find back are from 28th December. I'm not sure if I edited anything on 29th or 30th.

Frank

nicmare · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 1:19 pm

i cant understand your problems with modifying the phpbb template. i did this and its a bit tricky yes, but its easy when you know how it works. i recommend you, to download a nice looking color matching theme from phpbb and just edit the header and footer to look like cmsms homepage and you are done. its important to clear the template cache in the admin area otherwise you will see no changes

Ted · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 1:38 pm

Sonya wrote:

I like phpBB much more than SMF, however, it's awful for me that the old links do not work any more. It seems like if anyone had pointed to another thread that included solution, the link will not be rewritten and thus the solution cannot be quickly found

.

I did write a couple of rewrite rules for SMF style links. Can you point me to ones that still don't work?

Sonya wrote:

The extension txt has been deactivated and can no longer be displayed. Any reason for not allowing .txt attachments?

Not intentionally. I can enable it.

frankmanl wrote:

Yesterday I did quite a lot of work on the dutch WIKI pages.
It seems that is all gone...

Is there a way to recover that?
Not only I edited pages, I also uploaded images which are now not available.
Today I edited a page (Wiki/guidelines/nl) and saw prove of it, but these changes are now gone too.
Last changes I can find back are from 28th December. I'm not sure if I edited anything on 29th or 30th.

I copied the database and upgraded Mediawiki yesterday morning. Any changes should still be there. If there's an editing issue after the upgrade, that would be a little more reasonable that content disappearing. I can look into it.

frankmanl · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 2:18 pm

Quote:

I copied the database and upgraded Mediawiki yesterday morning.

@Ted: Sorry, I made a mistake about the page I changed today - that one is alright (should have been Wiki/nl in stead of Wiki/guidelines/nl).
Yesterday I worked till about 5PM dutch time, which is about 11AM at your place? Those changes are not in the current wiki.

F.

Ted · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 2:33 pm

frankmanl wrote:

Yesterday I worked till about 5PM dutch time, which is about 11AM at your place? Those changes are not in the current wiki.

Ah, yes. That sounds correct. I knew I missed a step in the migration... I should've taken the old site down right away. Honestly, I thought once I disabled the forum, I didn't think anyone would've been able to log in and make changes, but it looks like it caches the users after they log in once.

I apologize for that. Hopefully you didn't lose too much work with my mishap...

Sonya · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 2:48 pm

Ted wrote:

Sonya wrote:

It seems like if anyone had pointed to another thread that included solution, the link will not be rewritten and thus the solution cannot be quickly found

.

I did write a couple of rewrite rules for SMF style links. Can you point me to ones that still don't work?

index.php?topic=48274.0 -> found in Google should point to viewtopic.php?t=48274
index.php/board,27.0.html -> Old link to Russian board should point to viewforum.php?f=27

In the last example all links from language sites (e.g. Spanish index.php/board,30.0.html) that point to the forum are broken.

frankmanl · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 3:01 pm

Ted wrote:

Hopefully you didn't lose too much work with my mishap...

Actually I did. Is there any chance to retreive it? Or at least to tell me which pages I edited so I can do those again?

Frank

Ted · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 3:02 pm

Sonya wrote:

index.php?topic=48274.0 -> found in Google should point to viewtopic.php?t=48274
index.php/board,27.0.html -> Old link to Russian board should point to viewforum.php?f=27

Awesome, thanks. I'll fix that today.

--

Side note. If I install http://www.forumrunner.net/ on this forum, would other people use it (besides me)?

Ted · **Posted:** Sat Jan 01, 2011 3:30 pm

frankmanl wrote:

Actually I did. Is there any chance to retreive it? Or at least to tell me which pages I edited so I can do those again?

I've enabled http://oldwiki.cmsmadesimple.org, so grab whatever you need.

arnoud · **Joined:** Sun Apr 19, 2009 9:33 am **Posts:** 1177

Great work on porting the old board to phpBB.

Does anybody know how to split up the rss feeds per section?

All new posts in a rss feed works like: feed.php I only want to see the Dutch board and Announcements.

Wishbone · **Joined:** Tue Dec 23, 2008 8:39 pm **Posts:** 1316

nicmare wrote:

i cant understand your problems with modifying the phpbb template. i did this and its a bit tricky yes, but its easy when you know how it works. i recommend you, to download a nice looking color matching theme from phpbb and just edit the header and footer to look like cmsms homepage and you are done. its important to clear the template cache in the admin area otherwise you will see no changes

A really good theme is 'subsilver2' .. It looks like the phpbb2 default theme, but made for phpbb3.. It looks way more like 'normal' forum software... An example is here: http://foas.us/forum

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