Quick Smilie Box Choices

[Krill]

Oh god, that place that looks like a dogs ass crack? If you do upgrade, please for the love of god keep the normal/light interface for the site. It's the only decent background I've come across on any website.

[Locutus]

No worries there, I couldn't agree more. That's got less to do with the forum software and more with (apparently) being colour blind

[Krill]

Thanks mate

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by Solver
Ozzy, firstly, upgrading major versions isn't that easy. Upgrading between different v3 versions is easy - there's no autoupgrade for 2.0.3. to 3.x, however. And that's not even the key part. The key part here is that what we're running isn't really stock vB 2.0.3. Our version of the forum software is heavily modified, as Dan says, with lots of custom features added as hacks. Notepad, civgroups, PLUS, Hall of Fame - that's a few of the things we've created here, and anything we created ourselves would need to be upgraded manually.

If we had been running an unmodified or lightly modified forum we would have probably upgraded to vB3 a really long time ago

I think most of those hacks, if not all, are available in v3 as well. But better, I'm sure, than what we're running now. You guys have been saying for years that Apolyton has too many hacks to easily upgrade, but just take a bit to look through vbulletin.org, there is a huge amount of hacks available for v3. I'm sure you could reproduce a lot of the features we currently have with either upgraded or new mods. I'm certain all the important features will be accounted for in v3 one way or another. And hacks are much easier to install in v3.

But honestly, even if a few minor hacks and customizations can't be ported over easily to v3, that is no reason to hold back the entire forum. You will gain far more than you'd lose. Don't be afraid of change.

I know I've brought this up before, and I'll keep bringing it up because it needs to be done. If y'all need some help locating some v3 hacks I can see what I can find. That should ease the transition.

[Krill]

I'd offer what help I could but I don't know how to code or anything about servers

[DanQ]

The primary issue is that many of our forum modifications for the copy of vBulletin we're running now are custom from scratch (i.e. in-house) or customized greatly from their original. You just can't find tools that can help with that from the official forums for the software or elsewhere... or, at least, not that I have been able to find. I would gladly be proven wrong but I highly doubt I can be.

As Solver said, once we get into version 3.x upgrading within that version stream is a breeze on its own and certainly in comparison to what we have now. But we're not there yet. We are not afraid of change: we have to weigh the pros and cons of where we're at, where we want to go and how we're going to get there. That determines the speed at which we are able to move at.

We need to have in place the plan and the people that will allow us to move our forum data in its existing form into its/a comparable counterpart to the form we want to go to (i.e. vBulletn 3.x.). To have this happen in piecemeal, publicly, would mean some components not working well enough to needing to be disabled for a time (read-only perhaps) others missing entirely. That creates practical problems in the short-term, but also reasonably so in the longer term.

(e.g. we address issues X and Y, but issue Z needs more time. We launch with issues X and Y resolved, but Z is disabled or missing. In then going in to implement issue Z, we break something with issues X and Y which we could not (reasonably) foresee as we did not look at resolving issue Z along with issues X and Y prior to launch.)

Volunteers that are knowledgeable, trustworthy and available to assist in this are sorely needed and it would be greatly appreciated if they would step forward. (Heck, that's the situation in a number of other cases on-site.)

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
I think most of those hacks, if not all, are available in v3 as well. But better, I'm sure, than what we're running now. You guys have been saying for years that Apolyton has too many hacks to easily upgrade, but just take a bit to look through vbulletin.org, there is a huge amount of hacks available for v3. I'm sure you could reproduce a lot of the features we currently have with either upgraded or new mods. I'm certain all the important features will be accounted for in v3 one way or another. And hacks are much easier to install in v3.

The real issue is not to find equivalent hacks for what we have installed, but to find upgrade procedures for the data related to the original hacks. Also v2.0.3 is to old to be upgradeable by stock methods even without our modifications.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
I think most of those hacks, if not all, are available in v3 as well.

Yes, and that would be awesome if we were willing to completely dump everything we have now and start over: tell the people who bought PLUS that they're out of luck and have to buy what they have now all over again, delete our entire database of ~100 civgroups and related news items (which includes among other things most of our ApolyCon coverage) and tell people currently participating in DGs, leagues and the like that they have to restart from scratch (in the mean time revealing all the private forums to the general public), simply delete everything anyone has in their NotePad, tough luck for those who stored important data in there.

That's not acceptable for us. For one thing, there's nothing out there that's truly equivalent to PLUS. Yes, vB3 has a built-in subscription model that we in fact would love to use, but even once we're done manually porting over all the subscription data that basically just takes care of the payment side of things. The various bonuses for PLUS users such as no ads, bigger avatars, higher priority during high server load, etc is all stuff that still has to be manually re-coded for vB3, there is no easy way around that. There's also nothing out there that's truely the equivalent of CivGroups: it's not just a matter of porting over the data to the advanced usergroup controls of vB3 (which would be a huge undertaking in its own right), we'd have to manually recode the news pages, custom permission settings, etc. There are a lot of issues like that.

And it's not 1999 anymore when all of us were students with tons of free time. Just running the day-to-day business side of Apolyton takes up a lot of time (far more than most people probably realise), any special projects like this come on top of that.

Believe me, we've had the intention to do this ever since the new administration took over but if it was easy (or we had considerably more man hours available) we would've been on vB3 back in June when we switched servers. We'll get there but it's going to take time.

[LordShiva]

WTF is NotePad?

[OzzyKP]

Usergroups can handle a lot of the functionality of CivGroups and PLUS. You can use the built in subscription service, as you said, to track payments and such and just have those people be in a different usergroup. Within usergroup controls you can easily set no ads, bigger avatars, higher priority during high server load (the last one may be more difficult, but probably doable). All that is extremely easy. There is even a way to move members to new usergroups en masse.

Usergroups can also be used to easily control who sees and accesses private forums for civgroups. I think I found a hack that can be customized to show the icon. Or maybe this hack does it more directly. This hack might help make joining groups easier (but I haven't looked into it too much). I think the news stuff from civgroups can be done (don't quote me) with vbAdvanced. If not, there are plenty of CMS vBulletin hacks. But yea, the news would have to be ported over and that could be a pain. I assume though that the news is all stored in the database, and in theory should be easy to just transfer over to whatever database vbadvanced would require.

I don't know about notepad (honestly I've never used it nor known what it is or that it existed) but if an equivilent isn't available in v3, maybe just give people a heads up to clear things off of it before it is lost. Perhaps not a satisfying answer, but I think more would be gained ultimately.

It'll certainly take some work and I totally appreciate the fact that everyone is busy, but I think this is doable in the near future. Honestly with the expanded amount of owners/staff 'Poly has I think this whole thing could be done in a weekend. Maybe take a few weeks to identify what needs to be done, which hacks to install, which hacks could be replaced, who will do what, etc Then just schedule a weekend that several people have available and knock it all out. I think we'd all understand if you took a week off from Polycast and some other activities if it meant an upgrade.

If I may be even bolder... the holidays are coming up and typically people have time off around then. We'd have enough time between now and then to plan things out and prepare, and then just find a weekend when people were available and take care of it all then.

Another thought is perhaps you could install another copy of the forum into a different directory and then you'd be free to tweak and tinker at your leisure without disrupting or losing any of the current forum. Maybe you're doing that already and I'm just being obnoxious by pressing the issue, I dunno.

At least I hope I'm not coming off obnoxious. I'm just trying to help.

And I'll keep bringing it up.

[Gramphos]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
All that is extremely easy. There is even a way to move members to new usergroups en masse.

still there is the problem of porting the existing data. We can't just tell all civgroup members to rejoin.

I think I found a hack that can be customized to show the icon. Or maybe this hack does it more directly.

neither of these would make adding civgroups easy.

Honestly with the expanded amount of owners/staff 'Poly has I think this whole thing could be done in a weekend.

the problem is that the amount of technical staff/admins is not that big. And we all have other things to do, including keeping settler iv running.

[Solver]

We're not saying there aren't alternatives to what we have now. We know that vB3 does a lot of what we have and that there are other hacks that are useful. But our database structure is now pretty far from the stock vB structure, and that really complicates the effort.

Believe me, if it could be done in a weekend like you say, we'd have done it a long time ago. We have, in fact, identified what we need to do. Saying we could do it over a couple of days is a gross underestimation. Transferring only the accounts and posts wouldn't be too difficult, yes, but we're not going to launch such a heavily truncated forum. We did think a lot of these things over

And just to emphasize again - if there are any web programmers reading this who are willing to help (with at least PHP and SQL knowledge) then please, by all means, contact any of the administrators.

[Locutus]

Honestly with the expanded amount of owners/staff 'Poly has I think this whole thing could be done in a weekend.

Wow, just wow. You are completely ignorant to the scope of the work involved if you think that. A weekend? If you think that I'm not sure anything I can say will convince you otherwise. Believe me, if it was doable in a weekend it would've been done years ago. You act as if we don't want this done... Even aside from the fact that we really only have 2 people on staff with the technical skills to do the stuff that needs to be done (i.e. experienced PHP/SQL coders), even with 10 suitable people available full time you'd need a couple of weeks probably. Frankly, 10 people would just get in each other's way, as on vB2 especially this stuff is all highly integrated.

In a weekend you could get the basic functionality of the forum up, that's true, but then you have a bare forum and none of the huge amount of custom functionality and data we have now. We're talking about many tens of thousands of lines of code and SQL records that were all custom coded by ourselves over the course of 6-7 years. Recreating the same functionality on a new forum takes dozens if not hundreds of man hours. There are no scripts we can run, no automatic upgrades to get that stuff to work on vB3. We have to write those scripts ourselves. That stuff is very time consuming.

E.g. porting CivGroups entails a LOT more than just turning on vB3 usergroups, installing two hacks and waiving your magic wand. There are thousands of SQL records associated with CivGroups that are organised in a very different way than vB3 user groups. And we already use user groups for other things in vB2, so those systems would have to be integrated somehow -- something we'd have to hand-code. And there's a lot of functionality in CivGroups that vB3 user groups simply don't offer. Some of that may or may not still be available through hacks, but those hacks still have to be tracked down and significantly modified to work the same way as CivGroups do. Again, we're talking about at least dozens of man hours for CivGroups alone, and that's just one feature. But even if we do all that then all we really do is set up the next big problem because such a messy thrown-together 'get-it-to-work-somehow' solution is only going to make the upgrade to vB4 just as problematic. Coming up with a clean solution that's easier to maintain in the future is much more desirable, but takes up even more time.

Another thought is perhaps you could install another copy of the forum into a different directory and then you'd be free to tweak and tinker at your leisure without disrupting or losing any of the current forum. Maybe you're doing that already and I'm just being obnoxious by pressing the issue, I dunno.

You're not too far from the truth. We're not completely incompetent you know

At least I hope I'm not coming off obnoxious. I'm just trying to help.

We perfectly understand and we're all on the same page as far wanting this to be done. However, you've clearly never had to do anything remotely like this yourself. Setting up and upgrading a bogstandard forum with some standard hacks is one thing, but managing a major coding project and supporting a huge legacy infrastructure are a completely different story.

[Grandpa Troll]

Thank you all for the suggestions for our site, as stated we want the best available.

But really, thanks to the hard working folks here at Poly Staff and Admin who do these things, and even though the workload is high pay perhaps not quite per diem but still they forge foward, Semper Fidelis, Semper Gumby


My thanks to all and keep those ideas coming and I am sure if possible will be at bare minimum, reviewed and considered.

Grandpa Troll

[OzzyKP]

I still maintain that you all are making this project more difficult than it needs to be.

Existing hacks out there can replicate a lot of what Apolyton runs now. But not everything. Some things Apolyton uses now might not be done easily with v3. Are they really so critically important that they hold back the whole project?

I'm not saying we just get rid of civgroups (to use your example), but if there was a pre-made solution that can do 80% of CivGroup functionality (and perhaps even do some of it better), would that be an acceptable alternative? Sometimes progress takes sacrifices, and maybe some of the old handcrafted code might need to be jettisoned. And maybe things will work a bit different. That doesn't mean we should be satisfied with a half-assed product, but we should accept some changes.

Things don't have to be exactly the same as they are now.

Maybe a first step (and maybe you've already done this) is to take a tally of all the forum's current features and determine how valuable each is. Do people use them? Are people even aware of them? If they were lost or changed would people be upset? What other new features could be a good trade off? Make an "expendability list" to help you prioritize.

I know it is difficult to consider, especially when certain mods were made by hand and I'd hate the idea of throwing out something that you spent a lot of time working on a while back. But if it means the overall product improves, it might be worth it. Like you said, a clean version that is easy to upgrade is what we should be after. If you are just going to start from scratch and hand code everything for v3 then this mess will, as you noted, just repeat itself for v4. That is why I advise just doing some research on the best possible combination of existing hacks to take care of what you need. It won't be exactly the same, somethings may be worse, some things may be better, but long term it'll save you guys work and effort and can ultimately result in a better product since you'd be relying on the bigger vBulletin modding community that put way more time into modding vbulletin than anyone here does. So ultimately the clean solution takes far less time than the messy one does. But the trade off is adapting to some changes in functionality. It may not be exactly the same, and that's ok.

And I know you guys want to upgrade, and I don't assume you are incompetent. But those of us on the outside of such deliberations don't really know what has been done, what discussions have been had, what plans have been made, what kind of timetable has been set (if any) so it is only natural that we'd (I'd?) have questions. This has been brought up for years and there is always the same answer, that there are too many mods and it is too intensive to upgrade. Without any knowledge of what has been done already I'm just brainstorming a bit to try and help move the effort forward. After being eclipsed by that other site I have no doubts that you guys are acutely aware that something needs to be done, and an upgrade is just one part of a larger strategy for doing that, and perhaps not the most pressing, I don't know, but after several years it would good to see some signs of movement.