Development news: Forum upgrade

[Unas]

Development news
Forum upgrade

Following the AAOkube migration last week, lots of you had noticed issues on the forums.
To resolve them, I just performed a long due upgrade of the forum software.

As a result of the upgrade, your experience on the forums will change slightly.
I tried to reproduce a very similar layout to make it easy for everyone - I hope you'll enjoy it. Feel free to report anything you dislike and we'll see if that can be improved.


Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, the transition didn't go smoothly : the website was offline for most of the day today... and I've been forced to restore a backup of the database dating to this Monday 2020-10-12 06:28:37 GMT. Any post or conversation, and any work done on a trial since that date has disappeared.
I'm really sorry for that problem - but given the trouble I've gone through today, I'm already relieved to get everything back online now !

[ThePaSch]

Looks snazzy! A couple CSS glitches here and there, and the forum doesn't automatically switch to your browser/OS language anymore when you're not logged in - it's French by default. Also, it looks like there's a problem with formatting on the frontpage (at least in the German version). And all user avatars seem to have disappeared?

Other than that, it's not a big departure from the old UI, and I think the updated theme looks pretty great. Good to see the reduced trial manager is still with us!

[Enthalpy]

Here's hoping this is the end of the upgrade, and that it serves AAO well for some time.

Is there a way for us to see the new CSS, so those of us with some technical skill can help with the changes?

[Jofe]

the forum doesn't automatically switch to your browser/OS language anymore when you're not logged in - it's French by default.

Funny, because I'm french and it's English by default when I'm not logged in. x) (and it was like that before the update already).

[Unas]

Ah, good point regarding the language. I've just changed it to default to English instead, and I'll have to look into the language switching based on browser : I think it's a change I had made on the old forum by hand. I'll have to see if that can be implemented in the new one in a better fashion so it doesn't disappear in future updates.

For the CSS, it's part of a new forum style I wrote in the last 3 days and published here, open for contributions : https://bitbucket.org/AceAttorneyOnline ... rc/master/
Currently it's CSS only, just overriding the default phpBB theme to look more like the old style.
It could also replace some of the HTML code of the default style, but I'd rather avoid it and keep using the standard as much as possible. (The more files we override, the more files we'll have to maintain for future upgrades.)

As for the reduced trial manager, it's still here thanks to the other thing I worked on these last 3 days : https://bitbucket.org/AceAttorneyOnline ... rc/master/
Since phpBB3.3 includes a well designed extension mechanism (until now we were on 3.0 which didn't - and I had developed my own extension system to replace it but it made updates even more painful), I rewrote the reduced manager into that standard format. This, also, should make future forum upgrades a lot easier.

Once I release the docker-based AAOkube development environment, it'll become very easy to test it locally on your machine


Regarding avatars, indeed, it was a setting in the new forum version to disable remote images. I just re-enabled it.

[SuperAj3]

Thanks for the upgrade! I have one little comment, if you don't mind:
I find it difficult to see the page numbers in white font, on a light grey background. Is it possible to change the colours? (I might see if the older themes are still available and see if that fixes it.)

EDIT: Welp, this was already shared.

[ThePaSch]

Posts on the front page still seem like a mess of BBcode. Do you have any idea what could be causing that, Unas?

[Unas]

I noticed that too, I don't know what's the cause yet but that shouldn't be too hard to fix once I get a serious look at it.

Right now I'm focused on a more urgent issue : the site cannot send any mail, which prevents users from signing up

[Unas]

I've just pushed an update that fixes most of these issues, plus a few other details.

The only big problem remaining is regarding emails : after my work of tonight, the emails are sent... but are rejected immediately by GMail (and probably other mail providers) because I'm missing some configuration to prove that AAO is not spamming, basically.
So, I've still got some work left !

[Enthalpy]

The CSS changes look good.

Good luck on the email fixes.

[Unas]

Well, so far I couldn't find a way to make emails work properly in a reasonable amount of time, so I've decided to remove the setting that required an activation email, as that was the main blocking point - people will be free to log in immediately after sign up.
I've upgraded the captcha mechanism though, to try to protect against bots signing up...

[Enthalpy]

Is there any news about getting emails working again? I'm still getting used to not having an email when I get a PM I need to respond to. I completely understand if this isn't a priority given the rest of the upgrade.

[Unas]

Not yet, sorry !
I took a break from AAO stuff these last few days, to catch up after working overtime the previous days.

[AceAttorneyMaster111]

Any updates on emails?

[Unas]

Well, I know I'm answering more than 2 months later, but I've finally found the time to dig into the email configuration and set everything up.

In october, I had managed to get the AAO IP blacklisted because emails sent were failing spam filter checks...
This weekend, I finally took the time to move to a new IP address, set everything up properly with all the security stuff to authenticate mails (including FCrDNS IP + SPF and DMARC DNS records... yeah, that's obscure technical stuff, that is particularly hard to get right when everything is deployed in a dynamic cloud environment like now).

The point being, now the forums should be able to send you email notifications just fine