Quick Smilie Box Choices

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by Grandpa Troll


OzzyKP

This has to be a troll?

That comment was made in the context of my earlier suggestion that you guys just find a free weekend to knock some of this out. It does take some scheduling wizardry to find such a weekend, I am well aware, but a one time investment of like 10 hours in a weekend, times 8 staff members, that is a good amount of time to take care of a lot of things.

[Grandpa Troll]

Originally posted by OzzyKP


That comment was made in the context of my earlier suggestion that you guys just find a free weekend to knock some of this out. It does take some scheduling wizardry to find such a weekend, I am well aware, but a one time investment of like 10 hours in a weekend, times 8 staff members, that is a good amount of time to take care of a lot of things.

I agree,(Finding the schedule feasability) kinda like trying to get three-four people to meet regularly to play MP in a game.


But I am not the one who knows how to do what is being suggested so I shall simply defer to the powers that be....

[Locutus]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Maybe making such an appeal more public in the forum would be a good step. Let people know that you are working on an upgrade and need help. I'm sure you'd get people to step forward.

We've made this appeal many times in different places and forms over the past year: publicly, privately, in forums, in announcements, in A/C, in the OT, etc. No one with the right skills has stepped forward (other than our own snoopy, who we've been training internally but is still a relatively inexperienced programmer -- he's getting there but these things take time). There is a smaller need for less technically skilled people as well and we've had more success there, but the technical framework needs to be in place before these people can do anything meaningful.

[Solver]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Why would people have to re-buy PLUS when you later say you can just port over the subscription data. Later, Solver says you could just run an SQL query to do so. I guess I couldn't tell if Locutus' comment about having to repurchase PLUS is a ridiculous strawman or a true ignorance of how this would work.

We could rather easily transfer the simple record of whether a person is a PLUS subscriber or not. It still needs work to make the records play nice with vB3's system for paid subscriptions, but that's just the start of difficulties.

As for the various bonuses PLUS provides, I know I have seen hacks for no ads, or if nothing else it can just be done by making ad-free skins, and having PLUS members use those skins instead of the ad skins. [..]

Then Locutus mentions bigger avatars, which is a default option of usergroups in v3. That is ridiculously easy to implement. If you guys had been exploring v3, then he should have known that.

We have no-ads, bigger avatars, automatic exclusions from certain limitations and a bunch of other things I'm not sure about. These things are problematic. Again, in particular the database changes. We either need to change the way we keep PLUS records to accommodate for vB3's subscription and usergroup system or vice versa. That's difficult enough.

As Solver said, transferring over membership from civgroups to v3 usergroups is fairly easy to do with an SQL query.

And that'd be the mere record of whether a user belongs to a civgroup. Not much use.

Transferring over the news items, I understand, would be more intensive. Some thoughts though... there are CMS type hacks for v3 that have news features. I think something could be found that would do a pretty good representation of the existing civgroups.

Installing a CMS is a HUGE undertaking. This is where porting our previous items isn't as easy as one or two SQL queries. Whatever CMS system we'd use (and yes, we're aware of the choices) would use a system considerably different from ours. It again takes some serious programing to get it in shape for migration.

If, for whatever reason, the database structure is too complicated for an automatic move then show a non-techy how to do it and give them a few hours of work to knock it out.

It'd take weeks and not hours. On top of being a horrible idea. What we want, in the end, is a site that works. Doing such things manually would also mean that we'd need to continue using manual methods in the future. It's better to come up with proper automation that will enable us to use proper software later. That's serious programming, though.

Remember here that civgroups also give a bunch of features that aren't really mirrored in vB3. We have permissions assigned based on civgroups, some of which go beyond what vB3 has to offer. We have the whole civgroup administration thing, which is very different from vB3 usergroups. vB3 usergroups may be our best bet but there's a lot we need to rewrite there to get it working.


What you're saying makes it quite obvious that you've never managed, let alone programmed, something of this scope. We know that upgrading unmodified or lightly modified versions of forums is quick. I've done forum upgrades myself within hours - for default installations, which really is easy. We are on a whole different scope here and I'm afraid that it's hard to grasp without the relevant experience or technical understanding.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Locutus


And as far as analysing what needs to be kept and what not, do you really think we haven't done that already? Again, we're not completelely incompetent...

Moderately?

[Krill]

slightly?

[Locutus]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Why would people have to re-buy PLUS when you later say you can just port over the subscription data. Later, Solver says you could just run an SQL query to do so. I guess I couldn't tell if Locutus' comment about having to repurchase PLUS is a ridiculous strawman or a true ignorance of how this would work.

I was oversimplifying things a bit, that seemed necessary since you fundamentally misunderstand the complexities of the situation. Transfering the PLUS accounts to Subscriptions is doable (not nearly as easy as Solver suggests, but still doable), but that's the easy part. We have litterally dozens of hacks in place that tie into PLUS. They affect everything from our ad system (both on the forums and on the rest of the site) to load balancing to our mail setup. Some of these might be relatively easy to replace with vB3 hacks, but most aren't. There are no vB3 hacks that work with our ad system, our mail setup, our news script... Just because there are hacks that work with some ad system out there or some news script that's great -- works fantastic if you're building a site from scratch, but we're not, we have an existing site with existing software that all that needs to work on.

Of course we could just recreate everything from scratch and manually import all our old data so that 'dummies' can do most of the work and relatively few techies are needed, but (a) considering the complexity of our feature set even that would take weeks to realize with the little manpower we have and (b) we have about 120 GB of data on our server, manually transferring all of that into a completely new system would take months even if every single regular member on the site would help.

To recreate all PLUS functionality on vB3 (or any other sizeable feature that ties into the forums, we've not even named them all in this thread) will take at least dozens man hours no matter how we go about it, as we've pointed out many times now. We're looking for the best solutions to all of these problems both in terms of end result and implementation method and while we appreciate your feedback, your suggestions are a bit naive and just won't work for us.

As Solver said, transferring over membership from civgroups to v3 usergroups is fairly easy to do with an SQL query. Transferring over the news items, I understand, would be more intensive. Some thoughts though... there are CMS type hacks for v3 that have news features. I think something could be found that would do a pretty good representation of the existing civgroups. If the news stories are stored in the database, it should be another SQL query to switch it over. It might look and work a bit different with the CMS instead of the custom in-house script, but it would be a good trade off overall. If, for whatever reason, the database structure is too complicated for an automatic move then show a non-techy how to do it and give them a few hours of work to knock it out.

'You think', 'might', 'if'... Do I really need to explain what's wrong here?

[Locutus]

I'll take slightly

[Nikolai]

Personally, I'd say you're better than that, but if you say so...

[Krill]

Everyone screws up at some point or another, so slightly is probably about right for most people

[Gramphos]

You have no idea of the steps we need to take, or has already taken in order to be able to move to vb3. If I were working full time for Apolyton we could probably be technically prepared for an upgrade in one to two weeks, excluding time needed by web designers to implement our styles and other design issues.

However, my time is very limited, as I'm studying full time and working ~20% in addition to that.

[Skanky Burns]

So our best solution would be to start a fund to hire you full-time for a few weeks?

[DrSpike]

Is it really worth it just to re-order the smileys? (and some other fringe benefits).

[Heraclitus]

Meh, considering poly's population there is no need to upgrade, It'll just confuse the poor senile old chaps ....


PS Ozzy is right.

[DanQ]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
Meh, considering poly's population there is no need to upgrade, It'll just confuse the poor senile old chaps ....

PS Ozzy is right.

...

Can you be more specific?