Testing new forum

[HywelKeymaster]

Hi All,

With a bit of luck, this posting will work… I’m attempting to move the RE forums from the very old system they’ve been running on for years to a nice shiny new WordPress system.

This is, I admit, mostly for my comfort and convenience- WordPress is easy to maintain. And it has infinitely superior anti-spam measures which should mean that people can sign up for the forum much more easily.

Please let me know if you have any problems. One I am already aware of is that with the default WordPress Theme, the forum shows up with teeny-tiny writing; I will look into more legible alternatives.

In theory, your forum username should have been imported along with the posts. In practice there are a hundred ways that this can go wrong. You may be prompted for a password reset, you may find your old forum name has got “imported_” magically prepended, and various other funnies.

I’m also aware that the import has only gone back a certain length of time. The old forum will be staying up at least until the server on it physically dies, so we have the archive there.

If it all seems too much, by all means just create a new username for the new forum incarnation 🙂

And please let me know how you get on! If this forum goes well, I’ll make the switch fairly soon.

Cheers, Hywel.

• This topic was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by  Hywel.
• This topic was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by  Hywel.

[HywelKeymaster]

Hmm, bizarrely some of the post attributions seem to be messed up, too.

Not sure if there’s much I can do about it though… will see…

Hywel.

[Ariel AnderssenModerator]

Testing my replying capabilities!

[SableswordParticipant]

Testing…
I had to reset my password. And I was tempted to re-register as “aonurag” but I didn’t want to joggle Hywel’s elbow.

(Hmm, how did “lurker” get mangled into “aonurag”, anyway?)

[HywelKeymaster]

I have no idea! The mis-attribution is very odd, and very annoying 🙁 🙁

Clearly the import routine from the old forum has some major bugs. We seem to have retained the content, at least, but the users/atrribution/posting dates seem all out of whack. Sorry!

What we really need to decide is how the forum will work for new posts and discussions going forward… I’m hoping it will suffice, despite being simpler than the old forum stuff.

The main advantage behind the scenes for me is a proper spam filtering system- the old forum gets up to 1000 spam registrations A DAY, which is just unsustainable. We get hundreds of spam postings from the blog here already which the WordPress system seems to get about 98% right, with few false positives (only one or two so far). That’s so much easier to police!

So please have a play around and let me know what you think. If it doesn’t seem viable, I’ll look for another set of forum software.

Cheers, Hywel.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by  Hywel.

[SableswordParticipant]

It will depend on how much you can hammer the forum into being different from the rest of the blog.

One thing I’d like to see (or rather not see) is getting rid of the big header & photo on the forum pages. Make it so the forum pages have the
Home/Login/Register/Forums/About Me/Contact menu bar right at the top. Also, shrink down the size of the forum/subforum/thread title at the top – maybe not the size of the text itself, but certainly the whitespace above and below it.

So on this thread, the “Testing New Forum” title would be right below the Home/etc menu bar, rather than having a big gap, and also there would be a much smaller gap between the “Testing New Forum” title and the breadcrumbs bar: “Home › Forums › Previews & Announcements › Testing new forum”

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