phpBB3 Is Here!

[Anubis]

Welcome to phpBB3 everyone! It's certainly been a long time coming, and these last five days have felt like an eternity with us slowly overcoming the roadblocks that had fallen in our path as we tried to set this up. I apologise for that, as it certainly was not planned to have the forums offline for such a prolonged period. But when the time came we had little choice, and I just hope no-one has been too inconvenienced by the disruption.

That aside, now that we're here you will notice that a fair few things have changed in this new version of the board - far too many to be able to cover them all here. Most prevalent is perhaps the introduction of subforums to help make us a little tidier! The CN and WoW US groups will find that their respective 'satellite forums' have been moved to be Subforums of the main, and all archived group forums have likewise been made subforums of the Main Archive. Whilst I'm sure this may take a little getting used to from all of us, I believe that it will make for a more organised board overall.

You may also notice the change in the role of the Sticky. Announcements are far more clearly seperated from the 'normal' topics in phpBB3, whereas the Stickies are only by their icon now - they are not labelled "Sticky:" in the topic list as in BB2. For this reason, I have converted all former stickies into Announcements to make topic lists easier to read. I will leave individual group moderators to decide whether to remain with this setup, or resticky/desticky topics as they see fit.

Everyone will, of course, notice the vastly changed new "User Control Panel", which replaces and expands upon the former Profile system.

Moderators will notice a new Moderator Control Panel which vastly expands upon the previous functions Moderators have at their disposal, and also a "Quick Moderation Toolbar" at the top of each topic providing you with the means to quickly perform moderation chores without needing to go into seperate menus to do it - as you had to do with BB2.

Everyone should note that Signature Images are once again banned until Fahd has a chance to port his mod over to phpBB3. We have no timeframe on this, so we ask everyone to be patient and assure you it will be in place asap. The Xbox 360 Gamertag Profile Field is currently unavailable, but I hope to be able to re-introduce that sometime this weekend.

Finally, you may or may not notice various changes in the skin. I have done my best to improve upon the skin and fix any issues that I found in the BB2 version. It feels a lot more complete to me now, for a variety of reasons I won't go into here, and perhaps more importantly is now fully valid XHTML and CSS - meaning more consistant across browsers and standards compliant.

I must of course take this opportunity to thank those who have helped us get to this point. Fahd, KJ, MS, and most importantly Ed (who had to put up with all the problems we had this weekend and funnel them to our host!). Thanks all of you for your time, effort, and ability to put up with me.

I hope you enjoy the new forum. Bugs, comments, and suggestions can naturally be left here: all are welcome! Now lets never do this again until at least 2015.

- Anny

[BlackDove]

Goddamn, took you long enough.

[Messiah]

What BD means to say is "nice work Anny, and thanks".

Nice work, and thanks.

[Anubis]

I am told some people may be having issues getting to the forums due to the redirect that's been in place for the last few days having cached on their machines.

I'm afraid there is very little I can do about this, my efforts to put in place a replacement redirect to override the cached version having failed at fixing the issue. I am also, unfortunately, unable to update the news on the Main Site currently due to a final unresolved issue from the transition.

If anyone knows of someone having issues, could they please point them here: http://www.shatteredstar.org/forums/index.php which will skip past their cached redirect, or alternatively tell them to clear their cache.

Thanks.

And in response to Messiah, it's no problem at all. I'm just glad we have an improved, better piece of board software for the group now

- Anny

[BlackDove]

Lazy disappointing admin. Why do we keep you around here anyway. All you do is break stuff.

[Jericho78]

Well I'll be......you sure did take your own sweet time. LOL

Looks good but haven't encountered any issues yet. Great job!

[M.Steiner]

The Xbox 360 Gamertag Profile Field is currently unavailable, but I hope to be able to re-introduce that sometime this weekend.

Will you be including fields for PSN/DA/Wii which i did buttons for as well btw? Now that the board has the custom field feature? Be nice to have the Gamertag one back anyhow.

[Anubis]

The Xbox 360 Gamertag Profile Field is currently unavailable, but I hope to be able to re-introduce that sometime this weekend.

Will you be including fields for PSN/DA/Wii which i did buttons for as well btw? Now that the board has the custom field feature? Be nice to have the Gamertag one back anyhow.

The reason behind my delaying till the weekend is my hope that I will be able to do this at the same time, yes. However I cannot guarantee that at this time - it all depends how successfully I am able to construct a function for the purpose of displaying the correct image for each profile field. Watch this space

[enlightened]

Loving the clean new look Great work guys!

[Anubis]

To note, I have hidden the bot entries from the Who's Online list. Whilst they will still be included in the total "Users Online" count, they now won't spam the "Registered Users" list. Hopefully that will keep things tidier, and more relevant - displaying only actual members rather than random search engine probes.

[Syro]

I finally landed. I love it. Great job!

I love the global sticky!!! Noticed after my original post. BEAUTIFUL>

[W11chter]

I agree, the global thread icon is quite nice. The generic sticky is a little hard to see at first, but whatev's.

[Kon]

As I already said in IRC yesterday, the new forums are wonderful! Congratulations to everyone involved in getting all of this together. I too have to say that the global sticky icon is really great.

My only minor complaint is the "Save Draft" feature for regular posts. I can understand it for PMs, but for normal posting purposes it just seems like it gets in the way. I always think that that's where the "Submit" button should be. I suppose I'll get used to it, though.

[Anubis]

As I already said in IRC yesterday, the new forums are wonderful! Congratulations to everyone involved in getting all of this together. I too have to say that the global sticky icon is really great.

My only minor complaint is the "Save Draft" feature for regular posts. I can understand it for PMs, but for normal posting purposes it just seems like it gets in the way. I always think that that's where the "Submit" button should be. I suppose I'll get used to it, though.

I can shift the button placement around if that's a general feeling, though I am not so sure I can disable the feature itself so easily. I think 'Save Draft' was at the end initially actually and I moved it to the center as I felt it made the row of buttons more balanced - perhaps that was a misguided feeling.

Other thoughts on this are welcome.

[W11chter]

One thing I noticed on the Post a Reply page, too. The Filename box is overlapping on my display, under the Upload Attachment section. I'm using Firefox 3.0.6, if that means anything. Here's a screenshot:

[Isileth]

Works fine for me using 3.0.6

[Anubis]

One thing I noticed on the Post a Reply page, too. The Filename box is overlapping on my display, under the Upload Attachment section. I'm using Firefox 3.0.6, if that means anything. Here's a screenshot:

Huh, that was working fine when I last tested it. Looks like it is not hiding the textbox for you for some reason, or using the IE size declaration instead of the one it should be. I will check that on my home install of Firefox tonight - do you have many mods installed that could potentially cause issues?

[M.Steiner]

Displaying fine for me in 3.0.6 too.
(If it's any help, the extensions i have installed are: Adblock Plus, ColorZilla, Cooliris, DownloadHelper, Firebug, Flashblock, IE Tab, PDF Download & YSlow)

[Anubis]

Sorry it's taken me so long to get back on this. The problem doesn't seem to occur for me on Firefox 3.06 either, so I can only assume that addons or another factor are causing it. If you post a list of your addons I can try to trace the issue though, up to you

[Padishar]

Cheers on the new setup and thanks for all the hard work

[Stracius]

What Pad said. This is some good stuff, the control panels help better keep track of things too. I've yet to figure any practical use for saving a post as a draft, but meh. It's all good.