Service outage prompts big changes

Admin

Admin

Administrator
Staff member
Folks, our webhost overnight unceremoniously updated PHP and mySQL on the server, instantly breaking both our main website and the forums. We've been working feverishly ever since to correct the problems caused by this upgrade.

As a result, the easiest "fix" was to upgrade phpBB, our forum software, from version 2.0 to the entirely new version 3.0, which was designed from the ground up. So in a sense this was a good thing. You'll find additional functionality here at Liftlines, but it's also possible that despite our best testing you may find some things that our broken. If you discover an error please let us know by replying here and we'll do our best to fix it.

Thanks for your patience!
 
I hit save instead of submit by mistake, and it "saved draft." Where is that draft so I can submit it?

I found the draft via user control panel. But I'd advise in general against using the "save" option vs. preview or submit.
 
One nice new feature is the ability to subscribe to a particular forum (via a link in the blue bar near the bottom of each forum list of topics) in addition to subscribing to an individual thread. The Eastern folks, for example, can do this for the Eastern Lift Corral forum and automatically receive an email when a new topic is started. Like topic reply notifications you'll only receive one notification email -- you won't receive any more until you visit that particular forum online.

While there are numerous aesthetic and functional changes, most of the upgrades are behind the scenes and improve security and forum generation processes.
 
When I'm browsing the forums the user "Admin" is always highlighted in red. Is this the way you want it?
 
Nothing I can do about that. The forum administrator shows up in red, and global moderators (Tony) show up in green.
 
You leave town for one week and all hell break loose.

Tony in Green?

I guess this isn't related on his political views about Global Warming. ;)

Back to catching up. Carry on.
 
The aesthetics definitely leave much to be desired but nice to see there is a new version of the popular software. Avatar and user info is so different. I don't like it because it is not what I am used to perhaps. We'll see if it grows on me or not.
 
riverc0il":17jiu8r3 said:
The aesthetics definitely leave much to be desired but nice to see there is a new version of the popular software. Avatar and user info is so different. I don't like it because it is not what I am used to perhaps. We'll see if it grows on me or not.
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I can't disagree. As far as aesthetics go, I awoke yesterday to find multiple aspects of the website non-functional, so it was a rush to get the default package up and running ahead of the holiday weekend. Aesthetics come next, so don't give up yet.
 
Admin said:
I can't disagree. As far as aesthetics go, I awoke yesterday to find multiple aspects of the website non-functional, so it was a rush to get the default package up and running ahead of the holiday weekend. Aesthetics come next, so don't give up yet.
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No worries. I know what unexpected web site issues can do and the quick need to scramble a quick fix. Always "go" before "show". Hope the unexpected and forced changes are not too bothersome and time consuming for you.
 
Tony Crocker":3tm5hngp said:
I don't like having to scroll pictures now. I know, picky, picky, picky.
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Yeah, I've tried to figure that one out but I ran out of time before leaving on vacation. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere I haven't yet found.
 
Tony Crocker":7kfzrihx said:
I don't like having to scroll pictures now. I know, picky, picky, picky.
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Something I just noticed...just click on the image and it displays the complete image without any scroll bars.
 
That's because HTML was used to create those images rather than BBCode. The same thing will affect some of the embedded videos in my posts until I bother to fix them myself.

HTML is a huge security risk to the forums, and in the old version I was willing to accept some of that risk. In the new version HTML is disabled completely, and for good reason. There's not even the capability to allow it.
 
So what does that mean? I suspect all pictures are disabled in what used to be the old archives, summer 2004 and prior? Like my pics from Chamonix! Any fix possible? Those old reports now show the raw html code. The pictures are likely still there on your server but they do not show. Ignoring the html instructions also results in all those archives now reading as joegm-style stream-of-consciousness with no formatting at all.

I'm sure this is not admin's highest priority, but it is the slow season now, so maybe it can be fixed before too long.
 
Tony Crocker said:
I suspect all pictures are disabled in what used to be the old archives, summer 2004 and prior? Like my pics from Chamonix! Any fix possible? Those old reports now show the raw html code. The pictures are likely still there on your server but they do not show. Ignoring the html instructions also results in all those archives now reading as joegm-style stream-of-consciousness with no formatting at all.
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Confirmed. Crap. Insert Icon of I pissed off Emoticon. &%?&#@$
 
What? No edits possible plus why did the quote didn't work?

Sorry Marc...I know your not to blame, but this REALLY sucks. I don't see any positive here.
 
Patrick":3igque1d said:
Lack of quote, edit and icons seems to related to only this section.

I still think it sucks.
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Quotes work -- see above. Don't know why yours didn't...then again I just got out of bed and have had no coffee yet.

When the old archived forums were integrated it was done via a script created by a third-party author, remember? Apparently he accomplished it via using HTML code. A couple of points here:
  • The upgrade to v3.0 of phpBB was necessitated by the webhost's upgrade of PHP to 5.2
  • It's the authors of phpBB who have completely eliminated the ability to allow HTML
  • Right now there is no fix, but modifications to v3.0 are still few, and there may eventually be a batch modification released to convert that HTML code to BBCode
  • Yes, those pictures do still exist, they're just not visible

You had two choices at the time of the upgrade: lose visibility of the pictures, likely temporarily, or have forums that didn't work at all (some of you saw that and sent panicked emails, so you know what I mean). For now we have to deal with it.
 
OK, I just posted a support request on the phpBB community forums. For anyone who would like to follow those developments the topic is located here:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1051875

Let's see what response I get. From what I see the worst-case scenario would be to leave the responsibility for manually editing the posts from HTML to BBCode to their original authors. As an example, here I fixed Tony's post in about 90 seconds by replacing the <img src> HTML tags with BBCode img tags:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5103&p=22385#p22385

Note that this problem only applies to those posts migrated from the old Discus forum archives, which dates to 1999-2003 IIRC, and those few posts since then when the author chose to use HTML rather than BBCode to insert off-site photos.
 
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