For direct access use https://forums.oldunreal.com
It's been quite a while since oldunreal had an overhaul, but we are moving to another server which require some updates and changes. The biggest change is the migration of our old reliable YaBB forum to phpBB. This system expects you to login with your username and old password known from YaBB.
If you experience any problems there is also the usual "password forgotten" function. Don't forget to clear your browser cache!
If you have any further concerns feel free to contact me: Smirftsch@oldunreal.com

New forums online

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Smirftsch
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

Changed the color style a bit, what do you think? (Ctrl+F5 if you don't see it directly)
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Smirftsch
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

Added "Largefont" extension, which allows to style fontsize up to 400%, can be set up in User CP, also for mobile use separately.
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Hyper
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Re: New forums online

Post by Hyper »

[]KAOS[]Casey wrote: Sat Jan 23, 2021 3:59 am Are we sure this isn't newbies playground? every non-admin user is a "newbie"
Hm yeah, it is a bit strange that an user with 4371 posts is still considered to be a newbie. Maybe the forum has not made the posts that were transferred from YaBB yet.
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Pitbull
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Re: New forums online

Post by Pitbull »

Smirftsch wrote: Sun Jan 24, 2021 11:27 am Changed the color style a bit, what do you think? (Ctrl+F5 if you don't see it directly)
Better. The font size option works great btw. Thanks for that one. thumbsup
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Hellkeeper
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Re: New forums online

Post by Hellkeeper »

[]KAOS[]Casey wrote: Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:32 am Looks like you can turn that off
Ah good, I had no clue about all these new functions. Thanks for the tip. :)
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Stead-Z
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Re: New forums online

Post by Stead-Z »

Woah, new forum who dis?

Dunno what these post icon things are but I guess I'll use one anyway
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ividyon
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Re: New forums online

Post by ividyon »

Congrats on the move!

Gonna note two things;

1) OldUnreal has created a wealth of links over the long years of its existence, specifically to various forum posts. These links will die if the old forum goes offline without any preparation.

I highly suggest doing something along the lines of running a crawler and getting URLs for all existing posts on the old forum, and figuring out a way to place static redirects to the new forum threads, for example by reading the thread title from the crawled page and making the redirect feed it into the phpBB search page on the new forums.

It is extremely important to preserve the old forum URLs for redirection.

2) I already saw the first spam post; welcome to phpBB! I recommend setting up a Q&A captcha with a single, unique question which cannot be googled, and is super relevant to OU (ex. "what is the main accent color seen on the site? Rhymes with spleen"), and swapping it out if it ever gets breached.

3) 32 posts and it's already a 3 pages thread? I recommend setting the limit per page higher, like 15 or 20. Else there's a lot of page changing for little content. This is easily done via the Administration Control Panel.
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

ividyon wrote: Tue Jan 26, 2021 9:08 am Congrats on the move!

Gonna note two things;

1) OldUnreal has created a wealth of links over the long years of its existence, specifically to various forum posts. These links will die if the old forum goes offline without any preparation.

I highly suggest doing something along the lines of running a crawler and getting URLs for all existing posts on the old forum, and figuring out a way to place static redirects to the new forum threads, for example by reading the thread title from the crawled page and making the redirect feed it into the phpBB search page on the new forums.

It is extremely important to preserve the old forum URLs for redirection.

2) I already saw the first spam post; welcome to phpBB! I recommend setting up a Q&A captcha with a single, unique question which cannot be googled, and is super relevant to OU (ex. "what is the main accent color seen on the site? Rhymes with spleen"), and swapping it out if it ever gets breached.

3) 32 posts and it's already a 3 pages thread? I recommend setting the limit per page higher, like 15 or 20. Else there's a lot of page changing for little content. This is easily done via the Administration Control Panel.
Thanks ;)

1) Thought about this as well, but to be honest I have no feasible idea yet how to realize that, especially after the server move when the old forums won't work at all anymore. The search function works nicely though and I am already happy I was able to migrate all content. I did not spend any time so far for SEO optimization yet and although it will take some time the searchengines will update their links as well.

2) Again something I wanted to do already, I set it now to Q&A for registration with the same questions which served very well in the old forums. There are also quite some plugins which can help here yet.

3) Yes, good reminder, set it to 25 for now.
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Re: New forums online

Post by Stead-Z »

Smirftsch wrote: Tue Jan 26, 2021 10:59 am 1) Thought about this as well, but to be honest I have no feasible idea yet how to realize that, especially after the server move when the old forums won't work at all anymore. The search function works nicely though and I am already happy I was able to migrate all content. I did not spend any time so far for SEO optimization yet and although it will take some time the searchengines will update their links as well.
Apparently the search function doesn't work so well, as yesterday I was searching on Google with the terms "rechargeable flashlight oldunreal" which came up with a result of
"Rechargeable Flashlight? - Oldunreal Forums"
pointing to the old forums. However I've tried to get the search to locate this thread with several different parameters (using advanced search) and the only result it came back with was a completely different thread :-\

Also worth noting perhaps that the thread I was looking for is dated as from 2012 according to Google, and the only result from the search I got was a thread from 2015 (you'd have thought people might have written the words "rechargeable" or "flashlight" more than once over the course of 20 years lol) - perhaps there's some sort of indexing issue where the forum has ignored threads before a certain date?
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

Stead-Z wrote: Tue Jan 26, 2021 11:19 am
Smirftsch wrote: Tue Jan 26, 2021 10:59 am 1) Thought about this as well, but to be honest I have no feasible idea yet how to realize that, especially after the server move when the old forums won't work at all anymore. The search function works nicely though and I am already happy I was able to migrate all content. I did not spend any time so far for SEO optimization yet and although it will take some time the searchengines will update their links as well.
Apparently the search function doesn't work so well, as yesterday I was searching on Google with the terms "rechargeable flashlight oldunreal" which came up with a result of
"Rechargeable Flashlight? - Oldunreal Forums"
pointing to the old forums. However I've tried to get the search to locate this thread with several different parameters (using advanced search) and the only result it came back with was a completely different thread :-\

Also worth noting perhaps that the thread I was looking for is dated as from 2012 according to Google, and the only result from the search I got was a thread from 2015 (you'd have thought people might have written the words "rechargeable" or "flashlight" more than once over the course of 20 years lol) - perhaps there's some sort of indexing issue where the forum has ignored threads before a certain date?
I was referring to the internal forum search, google search results will surely take some time to be updated, that's what Ivy was talking about :)
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Re: New forums online

Post by Stead-Z »

I know, so was I :P

I've attached images to further illustrate my point - it's worth noting that now only our last 2 posts in this thread come up as results!

Image

Image

Image
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

guess I am re-indexing search...
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

I added a perl redirect for now which forwards any old forum url to this forum's root. Not perfect, but a start.
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ividyon
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Re: New forums online

Post by ividyon »

Ways to do the above point 1) are using a crawler like ScreamingFrog to crawl the full YaBB forum (before taking it offline/into maintenance mode), to create a full table of data about all the threads and their URLs, titles, response codes etc etc. Then, at least you have the data, and can process it at any other time. Moved a bit too fast with that stuff, unfortunately, though the crawler can also be run on a local machine if needed.
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[]KAOS[]Casey
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Re: New forums online

Post by []KAOS[]Casey »

Perhaps leaving the old forums up as read-only up on the old YABB url without redirect if a topic is specified could solve the old-links problem in the short term? just need to add some huge disclaimer somewhere that it's not used anymore...
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

I can take the old forums online again yet, but it will most likely not work anymore after the server move. Read only won't work, only way to do so is to keep it in maintenance mode which again won't allow guests to read (unless messing with file/directory permissions) . Yet, it still could be crawled. But even if crawled, I have no idea in which way it would be possible to redirect those to the forum topics here.
However, phpBB forum search is still re-indexing (12h+ now or so running), but I think once done search is working reliably also for the oldest topics.
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Re: New forums online

Post by ividyon »

I'm not sure how the forum could be crawled while in maintenance mode, unless you can pass the bot admin credentials/cookies somehow, which would also make it crawl internal forums like the 227j dev forums.

Once you have the crawl data we can figure something out - I've done this stuff at work and I'm glad to help out, as I was planning similar things for USP - but that vital first step of collecting the full crawl data needs to happen before the server move.
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Re: New forums online

Post by papercoffee »

The forum itself looks good and worked for me instantly.
There is only a little issue When I read a thread it's complicated to distinguish who wrote which post ...there is no clear separator or frame.
I had to use the app Dark-Reader and set it to brighten the page up.

Oh and that "auto draft saving" every 5 seconds during writing this post got on my nerves very fast.
Can I disable it?

EDIT------------------------------
I can't disable it.
autoDraft.png
They do nothing.
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[]KAOS[]Casey
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Re: New forums online

Post by []KAOS[]Casey »

There's text in those images its just not readable. triple click on the left side to select the number. you'll see its actually set to 200 seconds... I don't get constant auto draft saves so maybe some javascript is busted on your end somehow?
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Re: New forums online

Post by Smirftsch »

just fixed the css, text should be visible now.
20s should be default though.

Als adjusted the borders to be more visible now, does this help? (ctrl+f5)
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Re: New forums online

Post by eGo »

Yeah....bright green on pur black background....eye cancer is everywhere, needs more contrast in the topics and forum categories. The icons are too colorful, controls too brighten, text is too small (needs a magnifying glass on ultra widescreens)...it hurts the eyes. Hope you can add an alternative board theme to switch it in ucp
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Re: New forums online

Post by ividyon »

phpBB's default proSilver is already available in the options.
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Re: New forums online

Post by eGo »

Doesn't work for me...board preferences were changed but nothing happens. Tried the cookie or cache delete trick. Thats great stuff. :D
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Re: New forums online

Post by Pitbull »

eGo wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 11:28 am Doesn't work for me...board preferences were changed but nothing happens. Tried the cookie or cache delete trick. Thats great stuff. :D
Font size can be changed within your user cp. You can also change the style there as well. ( both settings are under board preferences) I have my font size at 130% Confirmed both settings work.

Image
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papercoffee
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Re: New forums online

Post by papercoffee »

Smirftsch wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 6:27 am Als adjusted the borders to be more visible now, does this help? (ctrl+f5)
This helps already a lot.

now I have to see if I can disable or make the auto-save interval longer.
It would already help very much that it doesn't show up at all even so it's saved in the background ... my ADHD would like it much better.


Ok I disabled it for now.
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