Bye bye to the new forum (was: Welcome to the new forum)
Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 10:16 am
November 9th 2022:
We decided to shut down the forum and move to github discussions https://github.com/exult/exult/discussions.
The missing mail possibilities of the forum (thanks again Sourceforge) made administration terrible. All new registrations had to be manually approved by me (Dominus), password resets had to be done manually as well. And then the speed was abysmal most of the times (at the time of writing it's pretty good, though) which made it a chore as well, often timing out when I had to do administration stuff.
Then there is the time sink of keeping the forum software up to date. All this added to my mental load and kept me from actually doing something about it. So the decision was made to move the activity over to github. Downside, another registration for everyone wanting to contact us. But this already proved to be turning away people from this board.
For now registration of new users is disabled and in two days the forum will go into read only mode, it's not planned to completely shut it down. If discussions on github turns out to be awful we can activate the forum again easily.
We are also still running the #exult IRC channel on https://libera.chat and lately we are in the #exult channel on the UDIC Discord server https://discord.gg/JQMz3Vqhu7
Old message:
We decided to shut down the forum and move to github discussions https://github.com/exult/exult/discussions.
The missing mail possibilities of the forum (thanks again Sourceforge) made administration terrible. All new registrations had to be manually approved by me (Dominus), password resets had to be done manually as well. And then the speed was abysmal most of the times (at the time of writing it's pretty good, though) which made it a chore as well, often timing out when I had to do administration stuff.
Then there is the time sink of keeping the forum software up to date. All this added to my mental load and kept me from actually doing something about it. So the decision was made to move the activity over to github. Downside, another registration for everyone wanting to contact us. But this already proved to be turning away people from this board.
For now registration of new users is disabled and in two days the forum will go into read only mode, it's not planned to completely shut it down. If discussions on github turns out to be awful we can activate the forum again easily.
We are also still running the #exult IRC channel on https://libera.chat and lately we are in the #exult channel on the UDIC Discord server https://discord.gg/JQMz3Vqhu7
Old message:
19 years ago we started to use Phorum as our forum software and 14 years ago was the last time we upgraded its software. As the latest is already quite old and development seems to have stopped we now switched to phpBB.
This was no easy feat and Qbix (of DOSBox) and I worked hard at migrating our old forum database.
Numerous hurdles awaited, 3GB of spam that the old Phorum unlinked but kept in the database, multiple conversion steps (Phorum 3.3.2c to 3.4.8a to 5.2.23, Phorum 5.2.23 to phpBB 3.0.14 to phpBB 3.2.9).
Why the many steps? Phorum to phpBB conversion only works from Phorum 5.2.23 to phpBB 3.0.14, and to convert from Phorum 3.3.2c to Phorum 5.2.23 you need to first convert to Phorum 3.4.8a. Yes, it's that complicated.
Of course the big migration from Phorum to phpBB asked for massive manual editing of the database as the conversion script didn't setup the users correctly. Not to mention that Phorum changed in between versions how unregistered or deleted users are handled.
The secondary url storage scheme (<someurl>) also needed to be corrected, as well as mangled posts from the 2006 Phorum upgrade (some topics/usernames in a bold tag and message bodies in an html tag).
And sometimes the conversion just went wrong for inexplicable reasons. That's why this took us so long
But here we are, we made it!
Some important notes:
- To combat spam a bit, anonymous posting is no longer allowed. You will need to register a username. This proved to be problematic:
- For security reasons, you are asked to renew your password. The old phorum didn't use a very secure way to store the passwords, so it might have been compromised over the years. Because Sourceforge made it impossible to use any email stuff in forums on their webspace you have to email us at forum@exult.info and we need to manually assign a new password to you, which in return you have to change afterwards.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20211012210 ... ort/15404/
- As we have all made posts with more than one username, due to the board allowing anonymous posts and us not always remembering our previous username, our posts are all over he place. We do have the possibility of merging users and we did some work already (on the dev team, Knight Captain, Wizardry Dragon, etc.), so speak up if you can spot users you think need merging. Be aware though, that anonymous users (which are all users who didn't register but just posted with a name in the old forum) are not listed in the member list.
- Registration dates and last active dates were not present in our old Phorum data, so there was nothing to migrate. Which resulted in us all having the same registration/last active date. Doesn't look nice but we couldn't help it.
- We did successfully migrate the topic and messages ID without having to change them. So if you have bookmarked topics, you just need to change a little part.
For example http://exult.sourceforge.net/forum/read ... &t=1791244 became http://exult.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1791244
And for good measure we implemented a read.php that will redirect to the correct topicJFYI, Exult's forum was first hosted by jackchaos.com until the site suddenly vanished. We never learnt what happened. But here is the last cache of it on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20010108002 ... =&Session=
- We are also using now the domain http://exult.info - it's still hosted at SourceForge but the exult.info is a VHOST.
Our first incarnation of our own board was short lived as apparently it ate its data see http://exult.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6
