The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

[Ancient Crystal]

Vortex - thanks for sorting it out. Software update looks interesting, I'll probably install it as soon as I've taken a few solid backups.

[Jatsko]

Great!

[admin3]

I'm hereby scheduling downtime for 2020-11-02, from 20:00 to 22:00 UTC to update the forum software. I don't expect to take the full two hours to do it - ideally, it should take a few minutes at most - but I don't know when exactly tomorrow evening I'll be available to perform the update.

[Jatsko]

If it already happened, I missed it, unless time zone differences means it's scheduled for today. Everything looks good on my end.

[admin3]

Ah, no - 2020-11-02 20:00 UTC was, at the time I'm writing this, just over two hours ago.

Unfortunately, I was busy with other tasks for most of the downtime I'd scheduled, and in the 20-30 minutes I was actually able to devote to the forum upgrade, I wasn't quite able to sort out some errors I encountered. Thus, the forum sofware has not been upgraded. No damage done, I'm fairly sure, everything was (of course) backed up just before the upgrade attempt. Unfortunately, I did exceed the scheduled downtime by five minutes to get everything running again.

I'll have to make another attempt, so I'm scheduling another two hours of dowtime for Thursday. That's 2020-11-05 20:00 to 22:00 UTC.

Edit - wait, why is the background gone? A moment.

Another edit - now it's back, and it was never even gone in all browswer tabs for me. However, it did stay gone across refreshes inside an affected tab. Must have been some temporary caching issue.

[Jatsko]

If and when you guys have a bit of time, three things I'm assuming wouldn't take too much time to do:

1. change link color to something more distinguishable
2. rename "Drawings" to "Your artwork!" (the exclamation point is very important)
3. find a way to change image display sizes to be smaller and more manageable. Something around 700px width or something?

[admin3]

Alright, after a slightly less stressful run at the update procedure it seems everything is working. The only asterisk is there's no version of the main forum style up to date to 3.3.1, but as yet this hasn't produced any visible issues, and I hope it will catch up soon. The forum should be freely usable again with just under 40 minutes left on the downtime clock, but I reserve the possibility of taking it down or reverting to pre-update backup within the remaining time, in case something breaks unexpectedly.

[Jatsko]

Great stuff AC!

If/when the admins find time to continue the forum reorganization project (remember that? :D), these are my suggestions for what to happen next:

-- Here's the link for more information on my proposed changes --

The biggest thing that needs to happen now, I think is to finish restructuring general discussion. That means

1) adding other interests as a sub-board, to join birthdays/projects/etc. If I remember correctly, Vortex held off on this because we weren't sure whether or not it would be an adequate place to put threads, but I believe it is. So that should happen.

2) moving all of A ' L L U K I N to a sub-board under GenDis>projects as well. That just needs to happen at this point, especially since the forum is formally under new active leadership.

From there I've been cleaning up and updating what I want to happen with other threads, so I'll look at that later and make the next round of suggestions.

[Vortex]

I moved A'LLUKIN to projects, but now I need to go. I'll do the other changes later today.

[- ak -]

I moved A'LLUKIN to projects, but now I need to go. I'll do the other changes later today.

I am okay with that, it haven't been touched in....... YIKES, quite a long time.

I would like to come back to that sometime, but man, I wish my life wasn't so busy. We could move that story elsewhere on the forum when I can resume it someday.