Forum closure tonight (Fri/Sat)

[french frank]

Mark will be closing the forum down for 45 to 60 minutes during the night tonight, probably at about 3am.

Sorry for any inconvenience, but shouldn't you be in bed by then anyway?

[hackneyvi]

Mark will be closing the forum down for 45 to 60 minutes during the night tonight, probably at about 3am.

Sorry for any inconvenience, but shouldn't you be in bed by then anyway?

If you can stay up then why can't we?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It may be because Mark lives in the USA.

[Mark Sealey]

That's right; it was 7 pm here when I started.

All done by sundown.

I bet it's hotter here than there, too :-)

[french frank]

If you can stay up then why can't we?

Moi? Moi? I'm warm and cosy in bed. Actually, of course, there's no reason why you can't stay up and watch the excitement - at some point you click to change views and you get a polite message saying, We're closed. Backson.

Thanks to Mark who keeps such a good eye on things

(Hmmmm. Small yellow note now keeps appearing, bottom right, saying, Auto-Saved. Reassuring or annoying?

Add: Another change - to PMs? It looks as if when you open a PM the reply window has automatically filled in the quote. If you don't want it you have to do a quick CTR + A and delete.

[Serial_Apologist]

Oddly enough, since I've gone over from Internet Expolorer to Mozilla Firefox, unlike b efore I find I have to register every time I reply, and then, without closing down or anything, re-register every time I come back. It's not the end of the world, but has anyone else experienced this minor inconvenience?

S-A

[Anna]

Add: Another change - to PMs? It looks as if when you open a PM the reply window has automatically filled in the quote. If you don't want it you have to do a quick CTR + A and delete.

That doesn't seem to work in deleting, nor does highlighting and pressing delete. Any other suggestions as to how to get rid of the auto-fill quote please? Also, on Profile page, the left hand column is now red rather than blue, it's now impossible to read the blue text 'Send PM', 'Find all Posts, etc.

Edit: Is it just me - the bold Radio 3 Forum banner has disappeared and now says The Radio 3 Forum powered by vBulletin in small, plain, font

[vinteuil]

Also, on Profile page, the left hand column is now red rather than blue, it's now impossible to read the blue text 'Send PM', 'Find all Posts, etc.

Edit: Is it just me - the bold Radio 3 Forum banner has disappeared and now says The Radio 3 Forum powered by vBulletin in small, plain, font

... just to say my experience here is the same as Anna's....

[salymap]

I prefer the old pages [just to be awkward] Very RED now, can't read words.Sorry

[french frank]

Keep the whinges coming in. Nothing (much) we can do about it other than give our feedback to vBulletin. So far, I haven't come up with any improvement at all. (Oh, perhaps Mark can revert? Why not, Mark?)

On the profile page thing, yes, it is very red. Don't see the point of all that red. That said, the links always seemed a bit pale.

On the banner - how bothersome! I spent a long time on that when we first used it. I'll try out various browsers to see if I can reproduce what you're seeing, but on Firefox there has been no change here. Perhaps IE isn't picking up the code correctly?

[Anna]

Oh well done ff, the banner is back again in all its glory!

[Mark Sealey]

vBulletin is undoubtedly one of the best of its kind, isn't it?

Their upgrade process, though, leaves a very great deal to be desired. It block-overwrites almost everything that's already been changed on the server.

I took this up with them when we first started the old Forum; it has to do with their attempts to cater for the different ways in which different FTP clients handle 'Merge'. For some and in some situations it'll work perfectly, just leaving alone files on the server - essentially - that are newer than those which its upgrade bundle expects.

What I have learnt that I have to do is actually disregard their upgrade procedure each time this happens and simply rename the forum in its entirety (after making SQL backups etc) and upload their new files into the place of the old. I always worry that the MySQL database will one day object to that. Though it really ought not to: it's simply looking at a location in a directory structure for known files with all the right permissions, after all. But it does argue against rolling back afterwards ever, unfortunately: the forum is a 'partnership' between HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. Keeping them all working as a unified mass is key.

Before uploading the new batch (tens of thousands of small .php files), though, I have to bring down several hundred from the existing installation on the server and place them manually, painstakingly and double-checkingly into the right locations locally, amending and checking if necessary before (re)uploading the lot (all 24 MB of it). Then running the automated upgrade script itself. This is when any custom changes we've made should get put into the new system.

Before we opened this version of the Forum (after the BBC's closures late last year) we took advice from vBulletin on exactly which files we should save. You may remember we had lost all our custom smilies at that point.

It was a bit hit and miss even then… we were told that, since each installation was different, no-one could advise us on exactly which files to preserve manually over the upgrade.

Still, I had what up to now has proved to be a serviceable checklist based on asking three times "…Are you sure there's nothing else?…" that we had covered every conceivable touch of local colour.

I've just added to that list the custom banner, which the system really ought to detect as being specific to our system and preserve, and also replaced it from the former installation.

And put it back.

That will be caught next time.

The other 'innovations', Yes, I suspect we should put our concerns to vBulletin.

In the meantime, I'll do what I can with any other requests/anomalies and oddities you have/notice.

Suggest SHIFT-reloading pages to clear caches. And avoiding IE wherever possible: Safari and FireFox much more likely to perform well.

[Russ]

The banner is displaying in a wide selection of browsers. (Have just checked at browsershots.org)

Russ

[Anna]

Oh, and another thing. Going to PMs it says I have 47 stored out of a total of 200 That seems far more sensible than the meagre 50 previously allowed

[hackneyvi]

Moi? Moi? I'm warm and cosy in bed.

(Hmmmm. Small yellow note now keeps appearing, bottom right, saying, Auto-Saved. Reassuring or annoying?

Small yellow note now keeps appearing, bottom right, saying, Auto-Saved. Reassuring or annoying?

Well, at almost 7 o'clock in the evening, now, it's about time you were up!

Re the Auto-Saved, I'm getting this, too. I thought I must have pressed some obscure key combo by mistake. The first time it happened, I struggled to delete what I wanted to. Seems ok now, though, but I can't quite figure what's triggering this feature.

A mix of annoying and reassuring. Reassuring because, if the text is actually being saved as I go along, this is somewhat welcome because I occasionally delete what I've written by accident.

Having said that, I've no idea how to recover text from the Auto Save, so really I'm no better off.

At this stage, then, annoying only.