This is a forum upgrade?

A post was merged into an existing topic: Limit on number of References?

Then there’s the issue of the historical record. Sure everything that was there seems to be there, but you should’ve created a middle layer to retain old links.

These are open source projects that likely have had thousands of contributions made to them over the years. I dare say not many companies are writing their own web software from scratch these days. The World Wide Web was still referred to as such, back when that was feasible.

More to the point, there is a layer that attempts to convert old links. The caveat is that given the variation in which links may have been copied initially, you may have to edit the link for it to work. The most common thing I’ve had to do is look for the t=<NUMBER> sequence in the link, and just take everything else out. That will usually get me to the right place, and I can update the bookmark or whatever once I’m there. For example, this is one I found that doesn’t work:

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=53084&p=275525#p275525

We can fix it with:

https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/viewtopic.php?t=53084

The ‘t’ stands for topic and the number is the topic ID, so if that can’t be found then it is likely the link would have been broken all along anyway—likely the topic was merged with another or deleted.

I know change serves a purpose, but in this case everything is different. It would be like rewriting scrivener again and just expecting people to be okay with the changes.

The previous forum software provider was no longer keeping up with the times, so we moved to a new system, when the dependencies it had were so ancient that it was enough of a security risk that our host was phasing them out. So that is your acknowledged purpose—in this case our choice was between sticking with a stagnating system that has been patched to work on newer platforms, or take the opportunity to go with a platform that still has passion in the project and is clearly moving forward.

That said, I question your reasoning. By your logic we should still be running Apple ][ and MS-DOS computers (and of course, whatever you started out with is what a Real Computer is). After all, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh System were a complete rewrite (well sorta, in one case) of the operating system, again, which just expected people to be okay with the changes.

There are periods of time where the colour of things change, and minor feature clusters are added or modified within a model, and then there are times of change when the whole premise must be rethought—because it’s been 15 or 20 years, and computers went from beige boxes belching hot air out the back and making cat scream noises over a phone line, to things you slip into a pocket, that pull the internet out of the atmosphere at a rate that would take a thousand screaming modems.

This is the way.

Ohhhhh … rightly or wrongly, wonder if we should conjecture a whole lot of change beginning to take shape on the edge of the horizon? Closer than that?

(I welcome change. Live in hope.)

Merx

But do we need helmets or not?

A post was merged into an existing topic: Adding a Lit & Lat Forum Search to your Browser

7 posts were split to a new topic: Adding a Lit & Lat Forum Search to your Browser

I must say, I’m enjoying the complete lack of spam in the new forums! Way to go on the security!

That said, I’m having trouble adding images from my iphone. Any hints?

It’s pretty nice from my side as well! I get a ping the moment a bot tries anything the system detects as suspicious, and it’s just a single click of a button to swat it away and ban the access info, before anyone sees it. In the past, after getting and reading a report from a user, I’d have to log in to the admin panel (which didn’t work half of the time and required logging out of everything and back in), looking up a user record by user name, running three separate functions to ban the account and finally delete it with all messages nuked.

I’m sure once it’s fully crawled and more well-known, we’ll see spam again, particularly any bots that know how Discourse blocks the basic crap that most spammers use. But it should overall be a lot easier to handle.

All right, I had a look at this, and there appears to be two ways to post an image. Two of them are mentioned in the help text before you start typing. On iOS I could only use the third method (maybe with the iPad I could have dragged and dropped, but I was on a phone), which was to use the Upload button. On my phone it was moved down to the lower right since the formatting toolbar was full. I didn’t post the test, but it seemed to work fine in uploading the asset and then creating a link to it in the composer area.

You should also of course be able to add a Markdown/BBcode/HTML image link to anywhere on the web, if that’s an option.

No, I can’t get a list of my posts an My Posts without category filtering.

I don’t see “code”, “URL”, or “quote” options, either.

Those three are on the toolbar for me, in the second group. For quoting you can just select the text you want to quote and click the button that pops up, too, even after you’ve started a response.

Right you are. Duh! Sometimes I’m selectively blinded.

Is there a way to use favorites (clicking the heart icon) as a bookmark, the way Twitter favorites can be used that way? Or is clicking the heart mainly a feel-good message to the writer of the post?

Thanks,

Thomas

The heart is just a way of showing your appreciation for the post. That does help them out as earning positive responses to posts is what helps you “level up” (and so does giving them).

If you just want to flag something for your future reference though, that’s what the Bookmark button is for. You can bookmark an entire thread at the bottom, but individual posts can be marked as well. You need to click the “…” icon and once you do that you’ll see the bookmark icon.

These will be readily available from your main avatar menu in the top right.

Thanks for the fast reply, @amberv.

(Is it really 2 in the morning where you are?)

Thomas

Come to think of it, you can review the posts you’ve “liked”, in your “Activity” feed (under the person shaped tab). So I guess you could use that like a kind of bookmark, but it’s a few extra steps to get there.

(Is it really 2 in the morning where you are?)

I have a rather unhinged schedule.

Hi - Some of us were in habit of adding images and other attachments to our phpBB posts, and a few of us put some care into them. Are they gone for good? Clear we should have saved local copies of these images, but they obviously still exist in an offline archive. If a user’s attached PNGs were made available by PM, I’d take the time to add some of mine back to their threads.

Cheers…Jerome

No! All is not lost. All attachments and screenshots (with the exception some stored inline, we’ve noticed) carried over in the upgrade. However something went wrong in that when I ran the first migration sweep to bring in the bulk of the data, I did so while the forum was running under a temporary URL. The import settings allowed for one to anticipate for a “live” URL, and while that setting kept cross-references intact once the new URL went live, it unfortunately did not do so for attachment links.

I should have realised something was wrong, in other words, when all of the screenshots were working fine the first time I imported, because that is when they should have all been broken.

So anyway, there is a piecemeal measure wherein an admin or moderator (and maybe even you can run it yourself if you have edit permissions on the post; it would be in the ... button beneath the post) can “rebuild the HTML” of a post, which immediately fixes all of the broken URLs within it. I just did that for the macOS theme thread, for example.

That would be highly impractical on a global level though, post by post! So the main goal is run a global search and replace on the server side of things, which I believe should be possible, as I’ve found instructions for handling scenarios like this—though in that case where one switches their forum to a new domain and wants to deal with thousands of internal links in posts.

In the meanwhile, if you encounter an older topic you were meaning to link a user to, and notice a crucial screenshot is broken and cannot fix it, flag it for a moderator to look at.

brave man, Ioa, though guess it has to be done…best fortune, and have full backup as I know you will…

(the amount the unsung go out of their way for all…to be appreciated)

Very late to the party here, but my 65-year-old eyes like the font treatments herein far more than the ultra-lightweight look/feel of the pre-Discourse forum.