Classicamiga Forum upgrade

[Harrison]

I'm pleased to announce that we have now moved to the latest vBulletin 3.7.0

Until now we have been running on the 3.6.X version of vB, and the next major version 3.7.0 has been in development and beta testing for the past 6 months. Finally yesterday it was released as gold.

vBulletin 3.7.0 brings a lot of new features to the forum software. Those already used to this forum and how it works will find most existing features exactly where they are used to, but many new ones have been introduced.

Among these are the following:

• Gallery - The forum now has a built in image gallery. This allows all members to create albums and upload any images they wish into them. These can be set as private galleries where only you can add or remove images, or public galleries where everyone can use them. You can also upload images into your gallery and then link them into your posts.
• Soclal networking - Another big new addition is social networking. This adds social groups, which you can use to form different groups for different purposes. You can also link gallery albums to social groups.
• Customisable Profile Pages - Think MySpace and you will get the idea. Members can now customise the layout and visual look of their own profile page. You can make it look just how you wish.
• Tags - You can now add keyword tags to the bottom of any forum thread. These keywords are then used in forum searches to aid better search results, and they are also used to generate a search cloud while you are searching.
• Search Cloud - You will probably have seen these on other sites. A search cloud is generated from thread tags and is displayed at the bottom of the search pages. This cloud contains the most popular 70 search keywords with them appearing larger the more popular they are.
• Attached images - images attached to posts has now had a slight overhaul. When you view attached images now, a new popup lightbox is used (similar to the one we use on the main site for screenshots). This stops the browser having to open a new window to display the full sized images, and also allows you to navigate between the attached images within the posts.
• Social Networking Bookmarks - There is now a Social Networking strip below all threads. This allows members to bookmark forum pages using their favourite bookmarking site i.e. digg, google etc...
• Delete as SPAM - This is a nice new feature for forum moderators. When moderating posts/threads moderators now have a new additional option to delete them as SPAM. This brings up a spam management page allowing the moderator to mark it as spam, and then to manage the user who posted it. Banning the member, deleting all other messages from them. Logging and tracking their email and IP address etc... very useful.
• Prefixes - A nice useful addition is thread title prefixes. These are added before the thread title and are displayed in the thread lists and thread titles. These are completely customisable and you can create different ones for different forums. I've already started creating some for the announcements forum, and this thread is using one that added Update! to the front of the title. These will be very useful to distinguish between different types of threads being posted. I've also already creating one for the quiz forum too that show Quiz and Results to separate them.
• Forum Notices - Until now, to add a notice at the top of any forum area, such as the Welcome message at the top of the main root page of the forum, you had to add a custom forum modification. But now Forum Notices is a new features included as standard and it is quite powerful. You can setup a notice for any forum and give it a set of conditions, permissions and rules. For Example you might set up a message that only displays for new registered members, those who have posted a certain number of times, a time limited message for competition winners, a notice for specific membership groups etc... quite a powerful new feature. In a way this is similar to announcements, but slightly different as announcements are just forum posts that are time limited and cannot be replied to.

I think that is about it. I will add any more as I think of them.

Upgrade and Testing status

I've been working on the upgrade, testing everything as I go and so far most parts are working as before.
There are however a few bugs to iron out. The biggest at the moment is the profile pages. The page layout for these is currently a bit messed up. I'm working on this at the moment and it should be fixed today.

Modification functionality

Most the forum mods we have been using are still working perfectly well. Please can everyone please test every feature they use on the forum to make sure it is all still working, and post in this thread if you find anything broken or working not quite right.

Pager - The pager is working but the notification of new pager messages isn't currently displayed in the top right info box under your "Welcome, username" message. This will be updated and back asap.

I hope you like the new updates included within this new release of vBulletin. Please post any feedback you have, good or bad.

[Buleste]

All i can say is thank god we're back. I was getting withdrawal form our mindless and inane chatter. Speaking of which has anyone heard form v85 recently? He creates a bloody hard quiz and then disappears. The cheek of it.

I've noticed that the unread posts counter message has gone form above the Private messages counter. Can we have it back please, I need a big flashing neon sign to say someone has posted a message.

[Harrison]

Yep, it will be back sometime today. It was a custom mod rather than a default feature of vB. Until it returns you can click the New Posts link in the forum menu bar to bring up the same page.

[Stephen Coates]

AmigaSpace eh?

And what the !"£$ are the links to Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google doing at the bottom of the topic? I am not coming back until they are removed.

[Harrison]

AmigaSpace eh?

Amigaspace?

And what the !"£$ are the links to Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google doing at the bottom of the topic? I am not coming back until they are removed.

Why? They are bookmarking services so members can bookmark a forum page using one of the popular internet bookmarking sites. They are not adverts if that is what you thought Steve.

[Stephen Coates]

I am not saying they are adverts (although they are advertising these sites, although maybe not deliberately).

It seems to me like the internet is going the direction of being split into three things. 1. Google (search/video). 2. Digg/del.icio.us and all that crap, and 3. Myspace/Facebook.
I was just (in a maybe not quite so obvious way) saying that such links aren't really going to do much but help this situation.

BTW, just out of interest, what happened to the idea of bookmarking a site in the browser's own bookmarks? I remember in the past seeing lots of sites which might have a little link saying 'Bookmark this site'. now that seems to have all but dissapeared, in favour of a long and constantly growing list of internet based bookinging sites, with few not even giving you the option of bookmarking it on your own browser. A good example of this is Vesalia's site, although they only have the list in a little drop down list, so it doesn't stand out too much.

Maybe I should go to the rant thread.

Amigaspace?

Soclal networking - Another big new addition is social networking. This adds social groups, which you can use to form different groups for different purposes.
Customisable Profile Pages - Think MySpace and you will get the idea.

From that I get the impression of a ClassicAmiga version of MySpace. I'm sure a better name could be thought of, but without thinking about it too much, AmigaSpace springs to mind.

[Harrison]

Oh OK I get you now. How about AmiSpace?

It seems to me like the internet is going the direction of being split into three things. 1. Google (search/video). 2. Digg/del.icio.us and all that crap, and 3. Myspace/Facebook.
I was just (in a maybe not quite so obvious way) saying that such links aren't really going to do much but help this situation.

All three of those are one in the same: social networking. It is the current up and coming trend of the internet and it is bringing more and more users online for longer thanks to faster internet connections. So yes you are correct, it is the direction the internet is heading, and quickly.

Everyone wants their own little personal space online and sites allowing them to add information about themselves without the need to know how to code for the technology working it all in the background is perfect for most standard computer/internet users. Likewise people love to talk about the things they love, be it through written word or video. More and more sites are now allowing them this opportunity again without them needing to know how the technology works. Even classicamiga has been doing this since the relaunch with the ability for all members to add reviews and comments to all site content, as well as setup profiles with images and other personal information and opinions.

User generated content is the future.

Another example that really shows how this approach works has to be Wikipedia. Completely user added information and look at how large and widely used this central resource now is. And even the Amiga site Exotica has now gone down this route.

BTW, just out of interest, what happened to the idea of bookmarking a site in the browser's own bookmarks? I remember in the past seeing lots of sites which might have a little link saying 'Bookmark this site'. now that seems to have all but dissapeared, in favour of a long and constantly growing list of internet based bookinging sites, with few not even giving you the option of bookmarking it on your own browser.

Many people use shared computers, or more than one computer, in their homes, at work, at university, in public places like libraries and cafes. But they want access to a central location at all times for their bookmarked websites. If you just used a browser's standard bookmarking facilities you only ever have access to the sites bookmarked on that computer. Using bookmarking sites means you always have access to them all wherever you are.

In addition these sites help out the sites being bookmarked. In addition to the central bookmarking facilities these sites offer, it is a smart way to get the users of the site to do a search engine robots job for it. People bookmark sites, the site collects all of these bookmarks and can instantly see how many people are bookmarking each and therefore how popular a site is, and in addition users access the bookmarks via their site so they collect even more information about how often each visitor is going to each site they have bookmarked. It is a really smart way for search engines to collect data without needing to code smart robots that need to trawl the internet looking for the sites themselves. Then once the site has the bookmarked site information they can then send their spiders out to collect a complete picture of a site's content.

So social bookmarking sites are very useful in search engine optimisation to aid a site being logged properly on search engines, and people finding the site in search results. So in effect everyone wins.

[Harrison]

If any members have problems trying to post in the forums you may need to accept the forum rules again before the site will let you post again. You should be able to do this from your Profile.

This has occurred because of the move from vBulletin 3.6 to 3.7. This was a complete code upgrade rather than just a minor update due to the software being a complete new release. This therefore broke some of the modifications running on the board because they were coded specifically for 3.6 and 3.7 has a lot of code changes.

I'm still bug testing everything on the site, but I think everything should now be fixed and working as it should.

As always, if you find something that is broken, an error, or not working as expected please let me know.

[Demon Cleaner]

I've been editing/creating/answering threads for 2 hours now, not encountered any problems so far.

[Harrison]

That's good to hear.