New Server

[mikelove]

If you're reading this, you're on the new Chinese-Forums server, administered by me.

 

If you notice anything missing or behaving weirdly, let me know. The front page layout was just a quick and dirty edit to remove the old sponsored bar, but I'm open to suggestions about other arrangements - I moved over the old database and attachments but it should be more-or-less a clean vanilla install of IPB otherwise.

 

Also, at the moment this is hosted out of a data center in San Francisco (at DigitalOcean, the same place we host pleco.com), but if that proves problematic for some users ping-time-wise, it's incredibly easy to migrate it to another one - our other options with DO are New York, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Toronto, Bangalore, and Sydney, and it's not all that difficult to switch to a totally different provider too.

[roddy]

Reporting in. Currently getting sent direct to the IP address, but it’s progress. Broadband hasn’t updated yet, but mobile ISP has. 

[imron]

Nice work 👍

[roddy]

Home sweet new home. 

[Jim]

Without the VPN I still get the migration message; is it just a case of waiting for the Chinese ISP to update the DNS or is there anything I can do?

[roddy]

If you’re on Windows you can manually add the domain and IP to your Windows host file. It’s a little technical but Google will guide you. Otherwise, I think it’s just a waiting game. 

[cncorrect]

The website is faster from my location. That's cool! I'm in China.

[Lu]

In the past weeks (months?) the website has been slow to load on the first time loading, to the point that Firefox would give a warning that the website is slowing my internet. It's still doing that. I don't know if the issue is my computer or something else. It's not a big problem for me (I just wait a minute or so until it's completely loaded and after that it works fine), just reporting.

 

The site just asked me to login with my email address, instead of with my username as it used to do. Is it possible to change that, so I can login with just my username?

 

On the homepage, we used to have a column on the left, which is gone now. Although I don't remember what was in it, so I'm not sure how important it is to bring it back.

 

There is a quote button now, I think it's a good idea to remove that, otherwise people might start quoting entire posts and that clutters up the forum. (And also for tradition's sake.)

 

These are my nitpicks at the moment. Thanks for moving everything, glad you took on this project!

[abcdefg]

Well done! Works well for me (currently in U.S.)

[mikelove]

Thanks!

 

@Lu - running it through a profiler I'm not seeing any obvious performance trouble spots, but I'll dig into it more. One bigger thing I've been contemplating - sometime between now and when the license for Invision has to be renewed in May - is migrating to XenForo (the software we use for plecoforums.com), as it's generally simpler + lighter-weight than Invision; the biggest feature we'd be losing is blogs, but we may be able to spin up an alternative system of those.

 

Email login: that's a security thing; since usernames are public-facing, it's much easier for a potential hacker to try random passwords with those than with email addresses. Is your browser not remembering your login information, or is there some other reason you have to type it in regularly? (can certainly revisit this if so - I had assumed that people would have to log in with their email again a maximum of one time before that would be saved as the new login)

 

Left column was mostly ads, which roddy stopped accepting payment for a while ago. And the top one was an ad for Pleco, so I felt like I wasn't depriving anybody of any free advertising that I wasn't also benefitting from myself.

 

Quote button: I don't see a setting for that, @roddy did you have a particular way of hiding this before? (maybe an extension that I didn't reinstall?)

[Lu]

On 1/27/2024 at 7:02 PM, mikelove said:

Email login: that's a security thing; since usernames are public-facing, it's much easier for a potential hacker to try random passwords with those than with email addresses.

Understood, that's alright then! Yeah, my browser remembers, it's not really a problem, just a change.

 

One other thing: I appear to have lost my moderator status. Could you re-promote me?

[mikelove]

Done. Also fixed Moshen who also lost it. There seem to be a few other statuses that didn't get migrated correctly, will investigate.

[mikelove]

Looks like the 'other groups' membership field somehow got nuked, will check later to see if anyone else is affected.

[Magelita]

@mikelove

I am trying to reply to a post and quote what was said. I can now only reply to the whole topic. Are there any help pages to refer to for that kind of technical question?

Maybe I am overlooking something.

 

I am glad that you are now looking after the forum, together with some moderators. I have been a long time member and fin d it very useful.

[Jim]

On 2/17/2024 at 4:52 PM, Magelita said:

am trying to reply to a post and quote what was said. I can now only reply to the whole topic. Are there any help pages to refer to for that kind of technical question?

Maybe I am overlooking something.

I've quoted you here by highlighting the text, then a dialogue box pops up under the mouse marked "quote" which does just that once you click on it.

[Magelita]

On 2/17/2024 at 10:14 PM, Jim said:

've quoted you here by highlighting the text, then a dialogue box pops up under the mouse marked "quote" which does just that once you click on it.

Thank you! Works like a charm

[Lu]

@mikelove I seem to be missing the spoiler tags, such as used here. I suppose they went missing in the server move, can you bring them back?

[mikelove]

That's odd, it's actually working OK on my end:

Is it not doing that at all on your end? Is there no 'reveal hidden contents' option or does that option appear followed by those hidden contents?

[Lu]

No, I mean, I can't make a spoiler in a post. The existing ones work fine, but I can't make new ones. (Perhaps I could if I knew the code, but there used to be a little icon on top of the field I write the post in that made it very easy.)

[mikelove]

Ah, sorry - should be back now, eye icon at the end of the toolbar.

 

Spoiler

Here's some spoiler text