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A few words about this maintenance stuff...

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 12:36 pm
by Ari Rahikkala
First of all, understand that taking so long to even get things to work at this level has nothing to do with my loyalty to Shireroth or lack of it. It also has rather little to do with any of the stuff I have to do to pass courses at the university, even though that *is* taking some of my time.

It's taken this long simply because it's incredibly annoying and frustrating to figure out all the little things that have changed or gone wrong in the upgrade. It's been, and will be for the remaining fixes (of which there will be many) an inexact process, fraught with anxiety, and a lot of frustration when things inevitably break due to some idiotic inconsistency(*) again. Every time I've decided "OK, this is the time, now I'll get this thing done!" I've gotten forward for a couple of minutes, then spent the rest of the session trying to follow some point of ugliness to the convoluted source code (oh, I would *pay* to have this stuff all in C, where I could set breakpoints and follow the flow of control...).

Inevitably, I've been putting off doing anything over and over again. This is simply because the task itself is so frustrating. If I had had a deadline on this, I'd have put off doing anything at all until the last night, and then probably given up somewhere around 3 AM...

(*)I fail to follow the thought processes of a person who thinks it's a good idea to use "row2" as a class name both for marking even/odd posts (so that you can change their background colours or something to improve readability)... *and* for marking the "replies" and "views" columns so that you can... um, I don't know. I can't think of any specific use for them.

</rant>

Anyway, um. Hm. Looks like the "View posts since last visit" link has gone missing... I don't know if the rest of you use it much, but I always did... *goes off to hunt that one down first*

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 12:45 pm
by Ari Rahikkala
"View posts since last visit" lives! The trick was greping for "time" which was suitably close and so could be expected to be in the same template file.. it's fortunate that the templates do have enough consistency that just copypasting stuff like this works, and it's much easier to recover old functionality by copying old code over than by rewriting it...

Testing posting with a subject.

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 12:46 pm
by Ari Rahikkala
Hmm.

Testing posting with a subject...

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 12:46 pm
by Ari Rahikkala
Hmm^2.

Testing display of edited message.

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 5:28 pm
by Kaiseress Carol
Ari

Thank you for all your hard work on the forum. It is good to have it back. I do have one request, though. Could you please put back the entry for time and date of posting for each item in each thread? I find it very helpful to see just when someone has replied to a thread, and how often this happens. Thanks.

Posted: Sun Oct 15, 2006 1:33 am
by andelarion
Yeah, thanks Ari :) You're doing a good job.

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 2:12 am
by osmose1000
If you want the webpage to point to this new forum URL I'll change it (I can't remember if you have FTP or not, hence the offer.)


In retrospect, I don't know if I have FTP, although I'm fairly confident that I have it memorised.

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 10:09 am
by Ari Rahikkala
FTP access would be much appreciated. You see, IIRC the reason why we don't have a forum.shireroth.org domain is that we've only got a limited number of subdomains... being that the site is mostly static and therefore simple to work with, I could change change some useless subdomain into a subdirectory (say, ministries.shireroth.org to shireroth.org/ministries), moving the files over and transforming all the links, without too much trouble. Or, if you want to, you can do it yourself...

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 11:38 am
by osmose1000
The problem is that we don't have the ability to do that -s far as I know subdomains are managed from the site control panel, which we do not have access to. We simply have an FTP account.

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 12:26 pm
by Ari Rahikkala
Does "we" mean all of us, in the sense that not even Erik has it? Because if he does have it, I'm sure I'll be able to nag at him until he fixes things..

Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2006 3:44 pm
by osmose1000
I usually assume that Erik is generally unreachable, so no, he probably has it.

Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 7:05 pm
by Gman Russell
Doesn't Erik hate Shireroth now... or some such?

Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 10:14 am
by Kaiseress Carol
I'm not sure about that, but he said he will no longer be responsible financially in any way for it, so we need to decide what to do about payments , if any, that need to be made for our forum.

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 11:22 am
by Gman Russell
and website.

Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 7:07 am
by Neike Taika-Tessaro
For what it's worth, I have decent amounts of webspace over at pinkgothic.com - I'm not sure if it would be enough to host your wiki, too, nor if I'd want that, but website and forum would be no problem.

Just a head's up in case such things are needed.

Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2006 3:28 pm
by WolvinX84
We really need to get control of all our passwords and accounts. It seems to cripple us not to have them.

Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 1:36 pm
by Gman Russell
That's *allways* been our weakness...

Posted: Wed Nov 22, 2006 12:41 pm
by WolvinX84
We should than fix it. Should we not?