Conversion Discussion

[James Gryphon]

Please ask any questions about the conversion plans, differences between forums, etc. that you have here!

[One-Eye the wildcat]

Will the next forum-thingy  work on legacy browsers? 90% of my time on the forum is on a kindle paperwhite, so if it won't work on that, I'll be really inactive.

[James Gryphon]

Well, it's a safe guess it isn't going to be better for legacy support than the current forum. But at that, it depends on what you think of as legacy. If it's a relatively well known mainstream browser made in the last five years or so, I expect it will probably work okay. I likely won't be able to use it in IE 5 on my Power Mac G4, though.

Update: I'll look into the Paperwhite's specs and see how the lay of that is. And if it doesn't work well now, it's possible we might be able to improve it.

[One-Eye the wildcat]

I just visited a forum that runs the myBB thing andit worked ok, soooo...

[Verdauga]

I assume you and anyone else setting up Ruddaring will be working to move posts over from here. Would you still recommend that we save personal work done here?
Furthermore, If we registered an account on Ruddaring and our original account is brought over, the other account will be deleted and our posts moved, yes?

[James Gryphon]

Well, Ruddaring (a forum on the Soopergrape page) is not itself a replacement for RACF, it's a testing and development grounds for a MyBB version of RACF. The conversion would involve setting up a MyBB forum on this server that works like Ruddaring, and then converting all possible data from the SMF 2.0.x version of RACF. Ruddaring as it exists now would become irrelevant after that process, and very likely deleted or archived away sooner or later. Anything on Ruddaring now is only for the purpose of trying it out and making suggestions; your regular forum activity should continue here.

As far as backing up data you have on RACF, you can if you want to, but it shouldn't be moved over to Ruddaring, which is itself ephemeral. It is probably unnecessary; in addition to the backup we plan to make of the SMF forum before conversion, the SMF forum itself will continue to exist for a while as an archive, and virtually all user data (topics, posts, PMs) should also be on the converted MyBB forum.

[James Gryphon]

I thought it was worth bending the double-posting rule slightly to make the note here that by commenting on and criticizing the MyBB layout, you're not 'criticizing my work'. A lot of the setup is how MyBB is out of the box, and the chances are decent if you don't like something, it's something I haven't worked on, not something I consciously decided to make that way.

That said, I don't use the forum day-to-day as y'all do, so even if it is something that looks like I've worked on it, it is worth commenting on. This preview period is for you and for smoothing over possible complaints and rough edges. It is far better to hear about issues now than to go through with the conversion and hear them afterwards when everybody is stuck with them.

[Verdauga]

To be perfectly honest, so far the layout is close enough to this one that I can't find much to complain about. Perhaps move the new posts over to the left side of the screen?

I see you have already done this. One feature that I enjoyed about this forum is the ability to quote more than one post from the reply page. Would this take awhile to implement over there?

[James Gryphon]

As far as just quoting multiple posts goes, you can do that, but MyBB has a different, perhaps less intuitive system than what we're used to on SMF.

As you know, on SMF, there's a list of posts on the 'reply' page, and you can hit "Insert Quote" to put it into the text area - so you start to reply first, then quote after.

The "MyBB way" of doing it is the reverse: quote first, then reply. So, you go through hitting 'quote' 'multiquote' over people's posts, and then after you've selected all the ones you want to quote, you hit the reply button and they're there.

However, your question wasn't just about inserting multiple quotes, but inserting quotes on the reply page, and unfortunately, I have to say that likely would take some time to work out. I'll take a preliminary look at this to see if there's any quick solution, but I wouldn't be surprised if this will have to be a long-term request.

[Verdauga]

Well, now that I know how to quote multiple times, it won't be so much of an issue. Thanks for checking it out James!

[Hickory]

Will MyBB see the return of the shoutbox?

1. If the conversion process is started proper and data is transferred, do you expect to lose anything, and if so, what are the chances of recovery?
2. How long would you expect the initial bugfixing period to be after the transfer? Obviously you intended to nip that in the bud with this preview, but I imagine there will be unforeseen problems after a transfer.

[James Gryphon]

Will MyBB see the return of the shoutbox?

Unlikely.

1. If the conversion process is started proper and data is transferred, do you expected to lose anything, and if so, what are the chances of recovery?

I haven't done a run of a MyBB conversion recently enough to know for sure, but this is my reasonable guess:

Things that have been added via mods (including existing mentions, Anonymous Poster information, and perhaps others) will almost certainly not be converted. It's possible some more niche or obscure features (like folders in the PM box), user preferences, and other things that don't correspond directly to the default MyBB setup won't be either. I'd expect that poll information should generally be saved, but since that feature is mod-augmented, it's possible some details may go missing there. Avatars, attachments, etc. that have been uploaded to the site generally seem to be a weak area for these kinds of conversions (even SMF-to-SMF moves have trouble in that regard), and I can't make any guarantees about how well the conversion tools will handle them. Some profile information, especially if it is added via mods or custom fields, may not be converted.

On the other hand, I would expect the actual posts/PMs, key account information (such as usernames and signatures), and basic poll data to be preserved.

As mentioned before, we intend to keep a duplicate of the SMF forum up for a reasonable length of time afterwards, either here or on my server, so as to give users a chance to manually move anything over that the automatic tools can't handle. Thus, nothing important should necessarily be permanently lost. It is probable some things will be lost eventually, if nobody moves it over before the archive is taken down, of course. Still, somebody will probably have copies of the database files somewhere, so in theory things that're missing could be drug up at some point in the future.

2. How long would you expect the initial bugfixing period to be after the transfer? Obviously you intended to nip that in the bud with this preview, but I imagine there will be unforeseen problems after a transfer.

It's likely. There's no way to know how long this'll take afterwards, but I'd hope it wouldn't last more than a few months, probably no more than half a year. I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that the staff have agreed to bring me back as Technician to help during this post-conversion process, resolving problems that come up, possibly making further upgrades and mod installations, and helping the staff and users adjust to and make the most of the new system.

[Hickory]

Will MyBB see the return of the shoutbox?

Unlikely.

Is there any big opportunities that MyBB will open up, aside from SMF simply being outdated? I look at big forums that use XenForo and see a lot of neat functions that I think would be neat to have here (or on Ruddaring, as it were).

[James Gryphon]

Firstly, I haven't explored the modding possibilities very much so far, so there could be a number of things that I'm not presently aware of. As always, if y'all have anything in mind that you'd like to see, mention it here on the Suggestions board and we can look into it. We'll probably look at the MyBB mod archive at some point to find what's there, and y'all are welcome to do so yourselves, bearing in mind that anything we get should be for 1.8.x, and newer is better.

I'd characterize MyBB as 'two steps forward, one step back'. The advantage of switching from a languishing platform to one that seems a little more hopeful is a key perk; if things were equal in that regard, we wouldn't have sufficient cause to do the switch. While MyBB adds some things, it also loses some things, and in many cases, the advantages are either incremental improvements, things that help the staff but not necessarily members, or things that are more reliable, but not necessarily 'better' in terms of feature set. That said, here's some of the more obvious end-user differences we've noticed from the current setup at Ruddaring.

1) The MyBB Alerts + Mentions mods are a little more powerful than the SMF Mentions mod, offering both mentions and standard notifications for notable events (for instance, having someone quote you, or reply to one of your topics).
2) Drafts are added, which are helpful for those who do most of their writing in the post editor (and who sometimes are forced to step away before the post is done).
3) MyBB comes with a 'Portal' for presenting new and current topics and events.
4) There's a convenient theme switcher on the front page. I expect theme switching to be more reliable in general than SMF's theme variants (which members have complained about on numerous occasions). The current plan is to have two themes to start with, Default and Classic themes similar to the ones here. It's possible there might be another dark theme or two, sooner or later.
5) Although MyBB's stock PM system isn't as powerful as the modded PM system here, it still offers some of the most important features, and should be considerably less buggy and more reliable.
6) The video embedding system is a bit more powerful, in case anyone wants to link to any videos from anywhere but YouTube.

(There are, of course, other differences, both bad and good.)

[HeadInAnotherGalaxy]

Zeze are juzt a couple o' minor queztionz.
Ah notice on ze Ruddaring forum ze perzonal text under ze profoile picture iz mizzin'. Are ve ztill gaein' tae 'ave zat, und ye juzt 'avenae gaetten tae it yet, or iz it zummat zat'z gaein' tae be lozt in ze converzion?

Und iz zere ze pozzibility o' ze zankin' ozerbeaztz' pozt feature comin' back? Ah ken zeveral member bezoidez mezelf mizz zat.