Forum upgrade and changes

Manchester United chat
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FuB
Site Admin
Posts: 2146
Joined: 8 years ago

All,

I've made references to this in some other posts but it's now time to make an announcement to everyone and, hopefully, get some positive and constructive comments...

When I fixed the current forum, i'd hoped that would be enough and I wouldn't need to do any more admin work other than what's needed to keep things going. However, a few weeks ago, I noticed that the "Captcha" system that stops (well, attempts to) non-human spambots registering and annoying us all is about to be disabled by Google. If "Captcha" makes no sense to you, I mean the things that you often see when signing up to sites that make you enter a couple of obscured words to "prove you're human".

Why are they doing this? Believe it or not, artificial intelligence programs are already getting past this system and so you might have seen that, recently, there's been a system of things like "select all store fronts" or "select all vehicles" from a grid of images. This is V2 of Google's ReCaptcha system and we need to implement it here or no one will be able to (a) register in the first place or (b) log in if they've had a fat-fingered day and typed their password wrong 3 times (easily done on a phone and I've done it myself).

Annoyingly, the ReCapture V2 system is not compatible with the version of the forum software we're using. OK... so we upgrade. Notwithstanding that trying to upgrade the forum caused all the issues we had before, it turns out that the latest version of the forum software is not compatible with the "theme" (the logo, livery and colours that are applied to the forum) that Ed bought previously. Therefore we need to change BOTH THINGS.

I've been doing some tests for a while and I have been able to do a successful upgrade of the software and Ed has purchased a new theme that we can use to make it a bit more United-like.

So...

Now is a good time to ask you all for suggestions for how things could look in the future. Obviously, there are going to be limitations in what's possible but I'm happy to try and sort out anything that's really held things back here. One thing that springs to mind is being able to embed youtube videos, etc... which I have already got working in my test system. There may not be much else that springs to mind but it's worth trying to get it all working BEFORE cutting things over.

Either way, this needs to be done - there's no choice - so here's a request for ideas so we all can be a part of the decision.

Cheers
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bman2
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Posts: 4592
Joined: 10 years ago

Being able to embed videos would be cool. Otherwise, regarding the style, keeping it clean and simple would be my preference. I think it's pretty good right now. We're not going to have to register again are we?

Thanks for your hard work.
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FuB
Site Admin
Posts: 2146
Joined: 8 years ago

bman2 wrote:Being able to embed videos would be cool. Otherwise, regarding the style, keeping it clean and simple would be my preference. I think it's pretty good right now. We're not going to have to register again are we?

Thanks for your hard work.


Absolutely not! The intention is to just take the database that we're using over to a new version. I've "already done it" so (hopefully not famous last words :D ) we'll end up with all posts, topics, users, avatars, blah blah intact.

"clean and simple" is pretty much the de facto standard on the internet at present (thankfully) so I haven't had to do any work at all on top of the theme Ed's purchased, really. Just some graphics and, obviously(!), the United red as a colour
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Robbo
First Teamer
Posts: 184
Joined: 10 years ago

Now that Guidelines are pretty much sorted,maybe a few changes to the forum.

For me how about.

Football Main Football Forum

Rant forum, ABU, Matchday Football sub forums

A Matchday subforum I find good because we then have all in one place

Off Topic Main Off topic forum

I would split in two one for general off topic and one for politically orientated discussions for example making use of Ed´s description of off topic "The original Den of Iniquity" we could have.

The Den/Den of Iniquity

The Commons/othername

makes everything a little easier I find that would be a total of two forums with 5 subforums three for football and two for off topic.

Looks tidier and a little more order.
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bman2
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That sounds good to me — although is match day necessary when we have a thread for every match? Maybe, just askin
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bman2
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I like the idea of something like den of depravity, keep rant more rant-like. Might be useful if the football and non-football sections were a bit more clearly separated, you might attract more newcomers on the basis of the United connection, before someone offered to fuck them with a spikey strap on because they suggested Young had a decent game.
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FuB
Site Admin
Posts: 2146
Joined: 8 years ago

Robbo wrote:Now that Guidelines are pretty much sorted,maybe a few changes to the forum.

For me how about.

Football Main Football Forum

Rant forum, ABU, Matchday Football sub forums

A Matchday subforum I find good because we then have all in one place

Off Topic Main Off topic forum

I would split in two one for general off topic and one for politically orientated discussions for example making use of Ed´s description of off topic "The original Den of Iniquity" we could have.

The Den/Den of Iniquity

The Commons/othername

makes everything a little easier I find that would be a total of two forums with 5 subforums three for football and two for off topic.

Looks tidier and a little more order.


Would it make sense to add another subforum to off topic? For instance, what about a dedicated subforum for "Other Sports" so, if people want to talk boxing or golf, it goes in there?
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FuB
Site Admin
Posts: 2146
Joined: 8 years ago

bman2 wrote:That sounds good to me — although is match day necessary when we have a thread for every match? Maybe, just askin


I think the idea is to have a separate forum for those threads. Aside from boxing them up into their own space, I can think of a definite advantage to doing that:

One of the most annoying things when trying to post during a match is when you get the "other posts have been made" notification and you have to keep hitting submit to get your oar in. That's a setting which is per forum so we could create a matchday forum without that setting... I think it's still useful on general discussion forums, though.
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Robbo
First Teamer
Posts: 184
Joined: 10 years ago

FuB wrote:All,

I've made references to this in some other posts but it's now time to make an announcement to everyone and, hopefully, get some positive and constructive comments...

When I fixed the current forum, i'd hoped that would be enough and I wouldn't need to do any more admin work other than what's needed to keep things going. However, a few weeks ago, I noticed that the "Captcha" system that stops (well, attempts to) non-human spambots registering and annoying us all is about to be disabled by Google. If "Captcha" makes no sense to you, I mean the things that you often see when signing up to sites that make you enter a couple of obscured words to "prove you're human".

Why are they doing this? Believe it or not, artificial intelligence programs are already getting past this system and so you might have seen that, recently, there's been a system of things like "select all store fronts" or "select all vehicles" from a grid of images. This is V2 of Google's ReCaptcha system and we need to implement it here or no one will be able to (a) register in the first place or (b) log in if they've had a fat-fingered day and typed their password wrong 3 times (easily done on a phone and I've done it myself).

Annoyingly, the ReCapture V2 system is not compatible with the version of the forum software we're using. OK... so we upgrade. Notwithstanding that trying to upgrade the forum caused all the issues we had before, it turns out that the latest version of the forum software is not compatible with the "theme" (the logo, livery and colours that are applied to the forum) that Ed bought previously. Therefore we need to change BOTH THINGS.

I've been doing some tests for a while and I have been able to do a successful upgrade of the software and Ed has purchased a new theme that we can use to make it a bit more United-like.

So...

Now is a good time to ask you all for suggestions for how things could look in the future. Obviously, there are going to be limitations in what's possible but I'm happy to try and sort out anything that's really held things back here. One thing that springs to mind is being able to embed youtube videos, etc... which I have already got working in my test system. There may not be much else that springs to mind but it's worth trying to get it all working BEFORE cutting things over.

Either way, this needs to be done - there's no choice - so here's a request for ideas so we all can be a part of the decision.

Cheers


You forgot the lightbox mate ;)

For those who dont know when you post an image it shows as a small image in the post, click on the image it enlarges in a frame thats the lightbox.
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Lazarus
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Posts: 2601
Joined: 10 years ago

Sounds like a whole lot of work.... Cheers!
"Respect! Respect! Respect Maan! Respect! Respect!........." [-X
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