Upcoming forum migration and upgrade - information

[avliswebadmin]

In the near future we are planning on upgrading our web hosting package to something newer than what was purchased 10 years ago. The current hosting package is expensive and will continue to cost more and more to maintain. Moving to a new package will cut our monthly cost by more than half. It will also allow us to upgrade our forums and wiki to newer versions.

That said, we currently use a few forum mods on top of our base forum, a portal, calendar, a specific theme and an embedded image gallery. Most mods are third party developed and are usually forum version specific. If the developers abandon their project then we cannot continue to use the mod when we upgrade as it will not work in most cases. When we upgrade the forums we will continue to use another similar portal mod (these are the helpful navigator links and other side bar blocks that you see). The current calendar that we have was abandoned development awhile ago so we cannot continue to use it. However, I think we found a suitable enough replacement that will integrate calendar options with posts and display them on a calendar. The darker theme on the forum will likely change to a slightly different one.

As for the embedded forum gallery, this will most likely not return after the migration as it has been abandoned and no great replacement has been found. It is something that might return later on if we find something but for now migrating the forum is the priority so that we can save on costs. If there are any gallery images that you wish to keep or save, you may want to look at saving them soon too.

Lastly, I'm not sure if anyone really still uses the old gallery.avlis.org site that was used for image hosting before. This will likely fail its saving throw vs migration and go away as well. It is another project that was abandoned by the developers several years ago.

If you have any questions, please let me know. There's no specific date set yet for the forum migration but it will hopefully be in the next week or two. An announcement will be made when this occurs and the forum will be offline (in maintenance mode) during the migration.

[avliswebadmin]

Just a heads up that I'm going to try to look at the forum upgrade today. I don't have a set time yet, but if you happen to read this and see that the forum is in maintenance mode, that's why! Stop by the discord channel and hang out when this happens! https://discord.gg/x9Sx99n

[Gorgon]

As for the embedded forum gallery, this will most likely not return after the migration as it has been abandoned and no great replacement has been found. It is something that might return later on if we find something but for now migrating the forum is the priority so that we can save on costs. If there are any gallery images that you wish to keep or save, you may want to look at saving them soon too.

Lastly, I'm not sure if anyone really still uses the old gallery.avlis.org site that was used for image hosting before. This will likely fail its saving throw vs migration and go away as well. It is another project that was abandoned by the developers several years ago.

Bumping this as well, if anyone has pics on either site that they don't want to lose!

[Plethora]

http://www.avlis.org/index.php

If you go to the Board index, you will now see a neat little worldtimer row just under the daily calendar, with at least four timezones!

[krackq]

We can add others, I just wasn't sure which ones. Trying to think of anything useful to add to the forums in lieu of some other missing functionality without messing it up too much! If you guys dont' like something we can always take it away or see if it can be tweaked.

[Katroine]

I think they look great (even on mobile).

Any chance of getting a link to the server counts back?
Also maybe adding the bug tracker to the quick links.

[tizmo]

I think they look great (even on mobile).

Any chance of getting a link to the server counts back?
Also maybe adding the bug tracker to the quick links.

The bug tracker is in the "MENU" on the left and is named "Report a Bug". And that menu is always visible. So, I'm not seeing much benefit to also adding it to the Quick links dropdown menu.

We are working on the server counts.

[Tel]

Maybe I’m missing it but I don’t see any menu on the left side on mobile, dark.

[Katroine]

I know this was mentioned in Discord but putting it here too.
The portal page is missing for a lot of us. It is apparently between Home and Board Index up on the left side for some people but not everyone.

[Sathsarrion]

I know this was mentioned in Discord but putting it here too.
The portal page is missing for a lot of us. It is apparently between Home and Board Index up on the left side for some people but not everyone.

This seems to be connected to the board style settings in the User Control Settings. I can see that link with the ProSilver style turned on, but with the black style I can't find any way to get to the portal page

[Sathsarrion]

...And within minutes of that last post, all the missing page elements started appearing for me in the Black board style. So it seems that either someone has just recently been tinkering with it, or it's taking quite a while for the changes to fully take effect.

[Tel]

Oof yeah I now have the landing that isn’t the forum index, it is not designed to reconfigure for mobile and all the side elements seem to end up at the bottom (which is fine) but the posts are cut off left. I am going to say GL-high-5 since I’m sure someone is tinkering and I look forward to seeing the final changes!

[Katroine]

That is the power of krackq, he sensed our struggle.