New Forum - Coming Soon...

Post by **Peter Barton** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 6:52 am

I will be migrating this discussion forum to some new software fairly shortly - basically as soon as I have everything working, could even be sometime this week.

As part of the migration I will be copying across the existing posts and users (where possible, I'm still working on making all this work!). This means that when you see the logon page for the new software, you should try your current user name and password to see if they work. If you don't remember your current password, the software has a 'forgotten password' feature, but you will need to make sure that the email address stored with your current account is up to date for that to work. So update your details now!

I will only be migrating user accounts that have actually posted to the forum, anyone else will need to re-register. This is because there are a large number of currently unused accounts (including various spam engines that have logged on), and I don't wish to migrate those. I've also hit a small number of user accounts that aren't migrating correctly (password issues, invalid email address stored, etc), so you will need to re-register also. I'll still migrate any posts, just with a slightly different username, to allow you to re-register your current one.

Once the new forum is running, I'll set up a temporary section for anyone with account problems. If your account gets copied across and you can't get into it, create a new account, log a post, and I'll fix it if I can. I'll post these same instructions there once the new forum is live.

Post by **Chase Bansi** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 7:20 am

You are the MAN!

I know we've all been looking forward to this for quite some time. Having been through software upgrades on other forums I know that it doesn't always go as smoothly as planned. I appreciate the effort that goes into maintaining a site and forum and it's often a thankless job. If there is anything that we as members can do to help just let us know.

MadMaxMovies.com ROCKS!

Post by **Justice** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 8:15 am

Awesome Peter!

This forum, while it served the purpose, needed an update. I hope the new one will have advanced features for the mods, and a lesser likelyhood of bots / spammers registering.

Post by **Madmaxing** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 7:38 pm

Thank you for your efforts. Everything you do with this site is greatly appreciated.......though my wife would like to kick your butt for causing me to bring a car over from Australia to the US......

Steve

Post by **TheDarkOne#1** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 8:39 pm

Quote: Originally posted by Justice on 06 August 2007

Awesome Peter!

This forum, while it served the purpose, needed an update. I hope the new one will have advanced features for the mods, and a lesser likelyhood of bots / spammers registering.

Indeed!

I can't wait to see the new forum.

Post by **Bad cop** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 9:44 pm

This should be exciting.

Post by **Nightwalker** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:50 pm

Great man. Lets hope we don't see those spammers again

Post by **Peter Barton** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 4:44 am

The new software (http://www.phpbb.com for anyone who is interested, by the way) provides various protections against automated software logging in to the site to spam. Only time will tell how well it works, but it is certainly better than the protection from the current Web Wiz forum, which is minimal. I just have to be careful to filter out as many of the existing spammer accounts as I can when migrating everything.

Beyond that ,I'll be running the new forum in its basic "out of the box" configuration at the start, there are HEAPS of configuration possibilities in the software, but I don't want to customise too much until I understand enough of it (I don't want to break anything basically). If anyone moderates any phpbb boards elsewhere, I might get you to jump in and assist, particularly if there's anything we should be custom configuring to make it better.

At this stage I am expecting to migrate somewhere around the weekend. It looks like I'm pretty close to being able to migrate all the data at the moment, so if everything keeps testing OK I should hopefully be in a position to upload the data into the new board some time over the weekend.

Post by **MFP 508** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 6:55 am

Very good

I think a clean up is more than nessesary! I hope the problems with spammers is going to be better.

Post by **Justice** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 7:17 am

You can pretty much change everything, just as long as you have the graphics and colorcodes you want. I wanted to create a better messageboard over at maxrockatansky.org when I saw the ammount of smack people and/or bots where talking over here.

That "new" bb was was also based upon the phpbb stuff. I started to custumize it into my site colors, but then I saw I had to adress all the graphic files aswell (icons and such). So I quit. Besides, it thought it would be better to keep all the fans central, where they belong.