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[Migration in prod.] The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Posted: 29 Apr 2020 16:14
by Ancient Crystal
Hello again, everyone. Long time no see.

According to various archives, the Pastel Forums have existed in some capacity since 2005, and I’ve been a member since 2010.

Either of those dates are a long time ago, and I suspect we aren’t who we once were, ten or fifteen years ago. The past ten years have seen me from a small kid to nominal adulthood, and I can only guess as to what the rest of you have been through. The past fifteen years have seen us collectively through something like four migrations, the release and completion of the Submachine, Daymare Town and Covert Front series, endless theories, trivial discussions and important ones, our own works of art, enough in-jokes to make anyone groan, all across 88 thousand posts since the migration to phpBB.

Of course, we are currently past our heyday, equal parts discussion board and museum to better, greater things of old. Still, great things loom on the horizon, and I believe this forum and community has much left to give, to all of us. Nothing lasts forever, and eventually, this forum too shall pass. However, I’m pleased to announce:

Not today.

For the past week, Vortex, MadBoy and I have been at work salvaging the database of the old forum, integrating it in a new host and repairing issues, of which there have been plenty. Today, we’re reasonably confident that the new host and forum software are stable, safe, and usable for all. All user content from the old forum - from messages to PMs to images to avatars - has made it over, and account information is intact, including emails and passwords. Aside from cosmetic differences, this new forum should function exactly like the old one, minus the bugs we’ve fixed.

I will be hosting the forum for the foreseeable future, and I hope I’ll do a tolerable job of it. Some minor bugfixing and tweaking remains to be done, which I hope we can get to in the next several days. More detailed accounts, both of the technical issues and of the history in general should be posted soon - we already have a video by Jatsko.

To many more years, if fate permits,

-- Ancient Crystal (elsewhere known as lupoCani)

SHIVA system administrator and interim Subgod

Re: A message from the new administration

Posted: 29 Apr 2020 16:38
by admin3
PS - I’ll admit, back when Mateusz left the forum’s hosting in the hands of the community, to a hint of envy as others were faster than me at setting up a new hosting solution. In retrospect, it was probably for the best - I am a far more competent server admin now than I was then. Still, in the aftermath, I did make a promise -
Ancient Crystal wrote:
31 Oct 2014 17:28
Edit: and should things take a turn for the worse, I'd be more than happy to shoulder the hosting. I've still got a redundant amount of free time and decent amounts of currency to sink into something like this.
- and I'm glad I could make good on that.

Much like AK and Vortex, I'll be using this separate account for admin stuff going forward. To somewhat slim the announcements, and make the transition easier to track, this will be the new dev/bug thread. Subsequent posts were moved from the old one, having been made post migration.

The previous thread is found here.

A timeline of events thus far, current as of 2020-05-29:

2020-04-22: (April 22) The forums are reported broken. The problem is diagnosed as a software issue where the forum version is too old for the php version.

2020-04-23: (April 23) Vortex closes the forums for maintenance.

2020-04-24: (April 24) Crystal sets up the prototype for the new forum, awaiting the database of the old forum. Vortex finds a workaround to download the database.

2020-04-25: (April 25) The old database is successfully installed on the new forums. All user content save for attachments, which were not in the database, is ported over.

2020-04-28: (April 28) After much bugfixing and repair, the new forums are ready for launch.

2020-04-29: (April 29) The new forums officially launch as pastelland.net.

2020-05-13: (May 13) The old forum shuts down completely.

2020-05-16: (May 16) AK appears in order to formally hand over the keys to the new administration. AK reports that the forums shut down completely because of extensive server failure by the hosting provider. Crystal and AK set out to transfer both a complete backup, including attachments and non-user content, and control of the old domain name, from the latter to the former.

2020-05-22: (May 22) With the complete backup transferred, attachments are restored to the forum.

2020-05-29: (May 29) The processing of the transfer of the domain name completes, giving control of pastelland.com to the new administration. For the time being the domain name redirects to pastelland.net.

List of outstanding issues:
  • Search is sometimes slow, or times out for no reason. Upgrading to phpBB 3.3.1 does not appear to have solved this. Appears fixed as of the upgrade to phpBB 3.3.3 on 2021-02-09.
  • Link color in the standard theme ("pastelland 2020", derived from "Basic") should be more distinguishable from standard text. Should be a one-line fix.
  • Investigate making the display size of user-uploaded images smaller. Fixed by Vortex, turns out there was a fairly simple setting.
  • Favicon gone. Easy to re-add, but unclear how it could vanish in the first place.
  • Search returns only very old and very new posts as results. Turns out the search index building operation window must be kept open for the process to complete.

Re: Forum's Website Development & Bugs & Problems Reporting

Posted: 29 Apr 2020 19:59
by Sublevel 113
Thank you, Ancient Crystal, for our new home. :D
Thank you, Vortex, for collecting forum data! :D

I will join this forum as soon as last resort of contacting AK will fail... or prevail. :D

You're experienced with coding, Crystal? Html and other stuff, to make this forum to good form?

-------

@Vortex
wait, you restored disappeared threads?

Re: Forum's Website Development & Bugs & Problems Reporting

Posted: 29 Apr 2020 20:09
by Vortex
hmm, what disappeared threads?

Re: Forum's Website Development & Bugs & Problems Reporting

Posted: 29 Apr 2020 20:16
by Sublevel 113
oh, wait, your and Jatsko's discussion is from April 1st. I thought it's fresh and happened after forum trasfering. XD

oh, also, one plea: please, can you fix link to new forum in old forum to "www.pastelland.net/forum/"? Because typing "https://pastelland.net/forum" doesn't work.

Re: Forum's Website Development & Bugs & Problems Reporting

Posted: 29 Apr 2020 20:23
by Vortex
Oops, sorry. I corrected it, thanks for the heads up :)

Re: Forum's Website Development & Bugs & Problems Reporting

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 01:51
by Postillionen
Congrats everyone for once again saving the forum!

Re: Forum's Website Development & Bugs & Problems Reporting

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 11:49
by admin3
I was going to set up a new Bugs and Problems thread under the new welcome message, partially to slim the announcements, partially to make this transition easier to track in the archives, since new technical problems likely won't have much to do with old ones. If noone objects I'll move the post-move messages there.

Re: Forum's Website Development & Bugs & Problems Reporting

Posted: 01 May 2020 17:06
by Vortex
admin3 wrote:
30 Apr 2020 11:49
I was going to set up a new Bugs and Problems thread under the new welcome message, partially to slim the announcements, partially to make this transition easier to track in the archives, since new technical problems likely won't have much to do with old ones. If noone objects I'll move the post-move messages there.
Thanks, the announcements section looks cleaner now!

Re: The new administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Posted: 01 May 2020 17:41
by Ancient Crystal
That's not a functional link, I think you used the

Code: Select all

[u]
tag (for "underline") instead of

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[url]
. Fortunately, there's already a link in the topmost admin3 message - though maybe I should make it more visible?