BBBB and the Future

[Zarniwoop]

Latest changes and updates:

I have killed the Film Feed the content is getting less useful and the ad pics are annoying even me 
FFG posts will now go into a single thread, which should produce less clutter on the recent posts list.
Boardgamegeek "The Geek Weekly" has also been stopped as these seem to just be clutter as well.

Days of Wonder/WOTC news posts will keep under review as they are less frequent anyway.

Still undecided about FFG continuing its relevant content but they post a lot and edit those posts which causes frequent duplication that needs to be tidied.

The Spirit Games posts will stay as I feel they are useful for us all and have the benefit the autoposts were originally started for.


As always I will keep an eye on how things pan out post these current changes. I am trying to post a bit more human content myself and hopefully by reining in the clutter we may encourage some others to join in again or start joining in.

As always your comments are welcome and appreciated.

[EvilGinger]

I also appreciate you working out and adding my humble blog to the RSS feed since I am beyond having time to duplicate post every thing - Bravo Zarni

I am left with the horrific thought that I need to be three or four of me at once

 Ginger

[Zarniwoop]

State of the Nation:

Well SMF have released 2.1 beta of our Forum software which means the branch I am currently running on (1.1.x) is end of life with no future support.
We can continue to run as we are but there is always the risk of undiscovered vulnerabilities being found and exploited which would be a risk as there will be no more security updates released.

Recently one of the key mods that I use, gcalsync, has started to cause problems. It provides automated syncs of Calendar entries here with my Google Calendar, which is attached to the BoardGameGeek guild area. I'm sure of the exact mechanics of the problem but it essentially breaks the calendar, no longer able to delete or update entries, so I have removed this feature to enable normal use for the forum.

This one one of the blocks for me to update the forum to the 2.0.x branch, so I think I am going to seriously look at moving over to the new version. This move may mean that some of the tweaks and added features may be lost or have to be recreated (if I can) once I get used to the new code. We may also lose the current themes, which may have to be replaced with defaults from the new one whilst I look for suitable themes to use.

The upside would be a more up-to-date feature set, the look and feel of the forum will use more modern browser features so there will be improvements. There will be the added bonus of being able to set more preferences on what you see of the forum.

The next step then would be preparing for updating to the 2.1.x branch once that has become a stable release or potentially awaiting the completion of the 3.0 branch but that is likely to be sometime off in the future.

Not sure what the timescales will be for this as I will have to create a test site to practice the updating, this will not be a light undertaking. There will also be a significant outtage of the site once I start the live update as ALL the scripts will need to be replaced and the database updated to a new schema model. Assuming I don't break anything irreversibly then we will have a new-look site with all the existing membership and data.

I will post more information soon as I work towards this, unless there are any huge objections to this move.

Thanks for your patience and I hope this will allow us to keep this community going and allow us access to more mods with on-going support so we can add useful additional features to aid our community here.

Cheers

[Zarniwoop]

So I finally got off my collective backside and have spent way too many hours on creating a virtual offline BBBB to work the kinks out of upgrading to SMF2.0.13. The work is on-going but so far it looks to be not too bad, the upgrade takes a bit of time but was relatively painless.

Finding updates or equivalents to the mods we are using has taken a bit longer

Going forward we will have a lot of the stuff we had before but not all or different takes on how to achieve a similar result. For you guys you should see s cleaner, faster code base with some new features to explore and enjoy.
I had hoped to avoid making any manual edits on the back end but sadly to keep some of the nicer "look and feel" elements I will need to frankenstien some code to make stuff work. Hopefully this will be minimal and not cause any undue problems going forward.

Upside I will have an offline environment to play with new features which means I should never break the live site x-fingers!

I couldn't find a designed theme I liked so I have handmade a similar theme to the BBBB Theme (Default) used here and there will be the default theme for SMF2 available as well. I will change the gfx a bit on both but they should be sufficient for most use cases. There is a version of the Enterprise theme but it is not perfect and I'm not sure I have the time to maintain 3 different themes if anything in the future requires hand-edits to their code.

I will post an announcement when I plan to swap over and the Forum will be placed in maintenance mode during the transition. Everyone will be reset to use the default theme in oder for you to be able to see anything post the upgrade but you will have the option to swap once you get back on.

As always please be vigilant in letting me know any quirks, glitches or problems and I will do my best to rectify them, sadly this will be a one-way trip so once I have converted I really won't be trying to reverse it. This should mean any updates to the core software needed to run the forum, SQL and PHP, should not break us. I will also start looking at and testing SMF 2.1 which will be the next iteration of the software with a view to going live once it has a release candidate, still in beta test at the moment, providing this update does not break me

[Zarniwoop]

Real life has taken its toll on these plans again I'm afraid. I still intend to do this work but work is getting stressful and there are major building works planned for our house which is taken a toll on our free time.

The lack of usage of the forum of late also has a factor in that it means it feels like I am only doing this for my own benefit. This is and always has been a labour of love but lately it certainly feeling like I am alone in wanting to keep it all alive.

The internet seems to be losing its sense of community, the one it replaced was much more direct and sociable and somewhere along the line this has been lost to be replaced with commercial, soulless social medium that care more about making money then making communities.

I am sitting in a chair facing down the inevitable tide of progress but I do lament that this progress is not always for the better or greater good for social interaction.

I still intend to update when time allows and I am also investigating other options as I have found there are scripts to create integrated social media like sites. The downside is that if I switch to one of these I either keep the forum, leaving it disjoint, or mothball it and move everything over but that would lose the history of the old site.....

There is also the question of whether it is worth the bother....

[Snakes in the Tiki Lounge]

I don't know about the social thing. There are plenty of communities kicking around, they're just not using the internet in the same way or the same places they used to be. It's a different world, these days, but the changes aren't all as stark as they might seem from certain perspectives.

There are a lot of communities that actively reject the corporately mandated advertising friendly sterilization of such gathering places, just as there are others that are run like soviet gulags where all unauthorised thought is stamped out in the name of keeping everything ad-company friendly.

The internet is a big, confusing mess of a place.

[Zarniwoop]

Well, blimey another couple of years of past and I still have failed to complete this.

I have recently started over and created another version of the offline site. The first attempt needed me to do some hand edits of code, not happy doing that again on the site as it makes adding/removing mods more complex.

Having started over I plan to see if I can do any customisation as a homebrew mod thereby being more in-tune with the script. I make no more promises of when, but I will need to do it as my host provider has already upgraded the underlying php version and if changes to the newer branch there is a real danger the forum will break.

So heading to 2.015, this may mean some features change or get lost as not all of the current mods have been updated. That said some features are now added in the core code and there are some other mods for the later software which could be interesting.

2.1 has reached release candidate stage so there is a real chance that could be final release in a year or two so I'll need to be ready for that as it should be another significant leap forward.

I will keep tinkering on here and I hope to get back in the habit of posting stuff around the place. If others join in great but if not this has been a fun playground for my thoughts and ideas as well as being able to learn new skills.

Well that's enough for now, hopefully I'll have an another update here in under 2 years this time