Hi all, I have been working a bit more on migrating the forums to vBulletin5, and Per and me think it's now in a state good enough to go ahead and carry it out. Among other things, I've looked into styling, and it turns out that it's easy to do. Just by changing the logo, and making it a bit more green, it already looks quite similar to the current production site: https://osforums.plexor.ch/ In my opinion, this level of styling is sufficient, as a first step. However, most of my work during the past weeks has been focused on the character encoding issue with older posts. During that process I came across this post: https://osforums.plexor.ch/forum/english/other-forums/news-announcements/ann... In this post, the change is announced, and the motivation behind it is explained. Interestingly, the forum maintainers at the time knew that the change to Unicode would introduce strange characters in older posts, and accepted it. And urged forum users to accept it, too. Nevertheless, I started looking into creating a tool that can fix the issue, with some success. For example: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/445384-LVM-Verschl%EF%BF%BDsselt-... vs https://osforums.plexor.ch/forum/deutsch-german/hilfe-und-helfen/installatio... Nice as this may be, it also clearly needs more work. But I'd like to halt that effort for now, and go back to getting the migration to vBulletin5 done first. Per Jessen and me will be performing the migration together, and have sent out a request for a new VM and started doing other preparation work. Regards, Olav On Tue, 2021-01-12 at 16:48 +0100, Per Jessen wrote:
Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:
Op dinsdag 12 januari 2021 15:36:14 CET schreef Malcolm:
Hi All That was my understanding as well, move to new platform....
My thought is just archiving off the older posts in the 4.2 release, this becomes read only for users to access (link too etc), newer posts imported into new Forum platform (say 12-18 months)...
Same here. And FWIW I'd love to see us move to Discourse.
Also, I don't know where the miscommunication originates. No pointing fingers, not blaming anyone, but I have seen posts here and there about the activity of contributors working on Discourse as a replacement for VB. I agree with Stasiek: I'd rather see us cooperate on that, instead of spending time on multiple options.
If a move to discourse is imminent, that is great - though in last week's Heroes meeting that was not the impression I got ?
In pure practical terms, updating the current vb forums setup would be a Good Thing(r) by enabling the server to run Leap 15.2 and PHP7.
Exactly - this is just about moving the current platform forward to a more current software stack while we wait for Discourse or whatever. It's pretty easy to do, and doesn't obstruct any other plans we might have for the forums.
Stasiek wrote:
The snag we had, and I can't tell still how important it is, is the thing that also happens with your version of the forums: https://osforums.plexor.ch/forum/deutsch-german/hilfe-und-helfen/installatio... forums before certain date are completely broken due to changes in encoding in php decade ago.
Olav will no doubt chime in later, but the point is that the current forums and the upgrade he has prepared are broken in the same way, except the URL looks better in Olav's version :-)
I can't take credit for that, of course - it's just the new version of vBulletin doing a better job than the old one. Regards, Olav