Move to XenForo software

[neptronix]

Dui; i appreciate the poke. i don't see it as rude. It has taken forever.

Don't worry about donations, we've got funding to pull it off, just not a contiguous 12 hour block of time that's required to do the transition live.

Here's what we're going to do. My schedule finally looks like something i actually have control of lately, so i can reliably quotea time now. How about i get the public forum preview going this friday so I can get some feedback and adjust from there. Sound like a plan?

 

[nicobie]

Yep! It sure does.

 

[tomjasz]

What was up with the error messages yesterday?

 

[amberwolf]

Oh no, i didn't get an alarm or any other smoke signals about this. Thanks for saying something.
Sorry for the bug! the disk on the server turned out to be full. We had a much larger image upload growth rate than expected.

We now have a +30gb larger disk which should be good to store the next year's worth of image uploads. Sometime early next year i will deploy a disk usage monitoring system so that i at least get a warning from the site.

 

[neptronix]

We're still on for today. I have a few servers i need to get security mitigations on, then eat lunch, then get the preview together.

Talk to yall in a bit.

 

[neptronix]

( working on it as we speak, and a good % done )

 

[nicobie]

You da man! We appreciate the free work.

neptronix for the win!

 

[neptronix]

Gracias;

Here's the preview thread:
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=118179

 

[marty]

eat lunch

Yes. But what did you eat?

 

[neptronix]

Always asking the difficult questions!

 

[neptronix]

Hey all. Just thought i'd give you an update.

We're putting the finishing touches on our forum-wide recategorization aid, Xen Sifter, and once the forum is launched, we'll be able to allow volunteers to pitch in to help recategorize, and earn a badge on xenforo for their efforts.. .



The new forum preview went pretty well, we have some short scripts to write to fix some bugs we didn't know about, and it needs about a day of CSS work and then we're done with all the prep work for the move!

We plan to wrap up this other work by the end of the month and set a date during December ( when we have the least amount of ES traffic ) for the final move.

Stay tuned and thanks for being patient!

 

[neptronix]

Just a ping.
We're at the 99.8% done point with the prep work as of today.

Still on for a mid-late December launch.. next update should include a launch date :thumb:

 

[neptronix]

Worked on the final visuals today.
+ Color adjustment is done enough - will need another round to get it perfect.
+ Beat up some glitches.
+ Changed the more 'in your face' blue into the traditional ES dark blue.
+ Shrink site width from 1280px to 1200px; more reasonable width.
+ Implemented some of the ES light blues.
+ Recursive quoted text now looks MUCH nicer than it does on phpBB..
+ Removed a lot of goofy lines in Xenforo that only serve to clutter up the screen.
+ Changed a bunch of 'romper room' Xenforo colors to ones that compliment the design.




I'm happy enough with the design that i'd say it's good enough for launch.

Tomorrow i will run a mobile check + bugfix round and then once we get a little code done ( next week ), we're ready to hit the big red button!

 

[Cowardlyduck]

Thanks for all your hard work Nep. Looking forward to the refresh!

Cheers

 

[neptronix]

Thanks!

Mobile mode is done. Here's ES 2.0 versus the default Xenforo look:



~33% more dense because we have a crapton of subforums to scroll through. 8)



Compared to ES 1.0, the look is a lot lighter and more useful.



The posts list is a bit of a quantum leap.
Some things are missing on the mobile version:
+ date of the original post
+ ability to jump to a specific post ( although it's one more button press to get to the last post )

..but it's dramatically cleaner and has a lot less ugly wrapping. :thumb:



Post view is a few % denser and also massively cleaner... there is room to make it denser still.

--------------------------------------------------

With these big improvements in mobile functionality, we won't be supporting the tapatalk plugin anymore because the ES mobile experience will be pretty plush on it's own. :thumb:

I'd call the visual aspect done and at this point we're just waiting on a tiny bit of code.

 

[neptronix]

OK!

That tiny bit of code to mass-correct user permissions is finished and all that remains is a final run-through of the conversion process since there were some differing results between 2 development machines that make us not exactly 100% of the conversion process.
That will be completed in the next 1-2 weeks.

The target conversion date has been moved to mid-january because i would like to see more feedback on v2.1 of the visual design.

If you have not checked out the preview, see page one of this thread for instructions on how to get in: https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=118179


And with that being said.. happy holidays, ES!

 

[ZeroEm]

That's great neptronix! Will try it again and a big thank you for all your time and work.

 

[neptronix]

You're welcome sir.

At this phase we just need to redo the conversion to note the steps down. I would like to get started on this sometime this week.

Also it looks like Xenforo successfully runs on PHP 8.1, and that version provides a noticeable speedup to Xenforo's underlying PHP framework.
We have done our testing on PHP 7.3 so far and already noticed that Xenforo's performance is better than PHPBB without any PHP version upgrades.

We expect ES 2.0 to be rather snappy and the upgrade to PHP 8.1 afterwards is another big bump in performance.

More soon!

 

[neptronix]

Sorry i have been late on my schedule. I took part of January off while my business was slow to do some hardcore engineering and got stuck in the rabbit hole pretty bad.

I'm doing the last test run of the conversion so that there's zero room for error on the big day.
Some linux level optimizations got the process down to 4.7 hours which is a big improvement over the previous ~8 hours.

So expected downtime is about 5-6 hours in total instead of an entire day ( HUGE RELIEF! :lol: )

I will run through the last parts of the conversion tomorrow and complete the 'playbook'. If there are no surprises like last time ( during lots of rounds of changes ) then i can set a definite date - probably next week.

 

[Cowardlyduck]

Thanks for all the effort Nep. Just make sure you take a backup before hitting the go button!

Cheers

 

[A-DamW]

Thanks so much for the hard work neptronix and everyone else involved.

I've been sporadically logging into ES 2.0, looks good to me!

 

[neptronix]

Thanks for the powerup, guys.
Okay, the process is proven, and is about 41 steps totaling around 6 hours in reality.
We did not experience the same anomaly between development machines this time so i'm very confident that What You See Is What You Get 8)

I'll submit for one last round of user testing tomorrow for anyone willing to give it another lookover and i think a realistic conversion date is the middle of next week.

Thanks for all the effort Nep. Just make sure you take a backup before hitting the go button!
Cheers

I will have a server image taken before i hit the big red button, and I'm a click away from restoring ES back to a pre-conversion state.
No chance of losing the patient ( ) during the surgery. :thumb:

 

[neptronix]

We have a move date now.

02/14/2023 - Prep work on the main ES server. If there's any interruptions, it should only be a few minutes.
02/15/2023 - Conversion between 9-11am Pacific standard time with an expected downtime of 6-7 hours.

 

[nicobie]

Excellent! and on Valentines day to boot!

 

[chuyskywalker]

@neptronix

I can't seem to attach images that would attach in previous forum software. Also can't find where the new limit is stated. (Admittedly, these are pretty big images, about 6mb in size)