Dreams of the Quill

Hey guys. I’m tired. I’ll try to keep this short, mainly because I want to go to bed. What? Homework? Well, shit. Click the more link to find out about something more important than Flak’s homework.

I wrote up a long, detailed post on the new forums answering some questions you might have. Please give the post a read before asking any questions. One thing I forgot to mention in that post was that there will hopefully be no more of those annoying 500 Internal Server Errors on posting.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the site has seemed less responsive as a whole lately, which is especially apparent on the new forums, for whatever reasons. Eventually, either my host will speed up, we’ll forget that it was ever faster, or I’ll move to BETTER HOSTING when I start cashing in big, years from now.

What do the changes mean? There’s some different links around. If you’re logged in, the Main Site Functions in the sidebar are slightly different from when you’re not (you have a log out link and a site admin link instead of a log in link and a register link). If you’re logged in, the Forum Tools section looks a bit different—you have access to your profile, and eventually you’ll see your PMs link.

Author pages are a bit different. They now link to a forum user’s profile instead of that user’s forum posts. From there you can see a good bit of info and stuff, as well as a link back to the author page. Woot for interaction between main site and forums. Hopefully I’ll get user-based post searching working in the future…

Your cookies are saved between forums and main site so you stay logged in with your one account between the two. (If you’re having trouble logging in, refer to the post I linked above).

Now for the major downsides, with respect to the main site:

- ??? . When I converted the database to redistribute user_IDs and reattribute posts to the right authors, file formatting somehow screwed me over and converted all my — (em dashes) to ??? (formatting errors). This is not something I’m going to go through and fix in one fell swoop, because there’re too many em dashes in my writing (I use’em a lot), and I’m not made of time and edit mouseclicks. When I’m bored, I guess, I’ll go through and fix pages, starting with stories and then making my way through the longer stuff. Maybe I’ll even get to the news posts some day.

- forum links. All links to forum threads are broken, woot. This is because the link scheme on the old forums was different from the link scheme on the new forums—phpBB had a “viewtopic.php” file and bbpress has a “topic.php” file. Apparently thread IDs were saved across the forum migration, so the fixes I need to make should be really easy, but it’ll still be a hassle.

- probably more problems will show up. Also, alert me of anything terribly wrong.

… those downsides aside, please try your best to put up with the new forums during their first days. No, I’m not going to abandon my efforts and go back to phpBB. I love bbpress. It just… has its share of problems. Which I’m going to have to deal with. So yeah.

ALSO.

I just spent almost every moment of free time over the last five days working on this change. I might not have the energy to get a full Drawing Harvest out tomorrow. Yes, this will suck as it will be a failure of sorts on my part. And yes, I’m mainly speaking to myself when I ask that you don’t hate me for it.

On a related note, I’m really damn tired. I love crit, and I love fixing things, but now would be a really bad time to pull a Surreal and tell me that I wasted my time, and that the new forums are shit, etc. etc. So yeah. Be nice, for at least a day.

Thanks. Enjoy your new stomping grounds, DotQ.