FORUM UPGRADES COMPLETE!
Hi everyone! If you missed the original announcement and were possibly wondering why on earth the forums were offline for the past 24 hours… Also why they look and function so differently, it is because we migrated from phpBB to Discourse. There are many reaons for this outlined in the original post below. Thank you for your patience, and PLEASE know that we are STILL going to be making some changes. Play around with Discourse a bit, and feel free to comment should you have any questions. We are working on the “Forum Tips & Tricks” section to provide insight on Discourse, we are also working to hopefully eventually get to a more customized theme, though this is less of a priority.
original post below
Hi everyone! Stick through this post because there’s important information that you need to be aware of! Important dates are at the bottom of this post.
History
If you’ve been around the Fire Panel Forums for a while, you’ve seen it evolve over the years, but for quite a long time now we’ve been using the phpBB software which has not evolved in correlation with the rest of the world. phpBB is a PHP based program with a MySQL based back end. It works, sure, but it certainly could be better. As years progress, the forum software https://www.discourse.org/ has been taking over the forum world, and offers many more features that phpBB simply cannot with out major modifications that are too difficult to maintain.
New Features!
- Many of the following have been requested in the “Suggestion Box” over the years…
- Editing and Deleting posts… Always (Okay technically we could’ve done this here but it’s been a rule since before my time)
- Dark Mode (and other theme selection)
- Liking Posts
- Reply directly to a post (rather than just quote a user)
- Sign in with Google or Discord
- Increased mobile-friendliness
- Push Notifications to Browser (optional, can always be turned off!)
- 2-Factor Authentication increases security significantly! (Optional)
- More profile customization, including banners and similar.
- Works like a Mobile App when saved to your iOS or Android home screen!
What are the caveats?
With all good things come some troubles, here’s what we can expect:
- While there is an option to transfer user passwords, the transition program does not appear to work as it should. Users will be need to reset their passwords. Don’t worry, as long as you have a valid email linked to your account, this is an easy, fast process!
- Things are going to look and work a little differently than we’re used to… This is a learning curve for you and me both. Please be patient with us, but feel free to give feedback on the new forums!
- YouTube embeds do not copy over properly on the new forums. Original posters can edit the post to fix it, but a YouTube video ID can be seen by all users, making it easy to copy and paste to view the video. (Mods can edit it too, but we are very limited on time…)
- Some images and links load goofy, unfortunately this is out of our control as well.
- Users that no longer exist show up as ‘system’ but their original posts remain visible
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there’s a lot of good but minimal trouble this will cause. Rest assured, we’ll be writing the “Forum Tips & Tricks” section from scratch to help everyone transition to the new site with hopefully minimal hiccups. I’m very excited for this, and I hope you are too! I promise to work hard to keep these forums alive and well. I’ve learned a lot from the members here, and I want everyone to be able to enjoy them for many years to come. This transition has been a plan of mine for quite some time, so I’m excited to finally bring it to light. With that being said, this transition process is set to begin early next week! My current plan is Monday, February 15th, though that is subject to change. The forums will be offline during the transition process, as migration of data is a critical, yet time consuming piece of this.
