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- Jan 8, 2009
Blue Moon will be going down Monday Morning (US time) May 28th, for converting to Xenforo.
Read all of the bullet points carefully, please. Especially the action items one.
Stuff You May Want to Do.
• Accounts sharing an e-mail will be merged to the lowest user ID. Either setup a different e-mail for your alts, use subaccount tricks, or let them get merged.
• If you have not joined us on Discord you may want to do so. Staff won't be able to verify your postcount while we are upgrading.
• Elliquiy will still be open during the conversion. Being a gated forum, if you have an approval waiting there you may want to check your intro thread. Or wait.
• Save your buddy and ignore lists. found here. Xenforo has an ignore list but no buddy list. I will be looking at adding a buddy system in the future. For now though you will want to save the lists and hang onto them.
• Clear out your drafts. Especially for private conversations. Converting these properly is tricky and it's best just to not have any. PMs will either get fully converted (sent) or ignored by the converter, while post drafts will be converted as moderated posts.
• Linked avatars don't convert well - partly MyBB's fault. I highly suggest, if you linked your avatar rather than uploaded it, to download and upload your avatar instead before the conversion.
• Photobucket. Photobucket everywhere. It's pretty jarring after the conversion. If you see a post with the Photobucket curse, please report the post you see it in so we can excise Photobucket from that post and/or their profile.
• I will be blanking all Photobucket signatures before the conversion. If you have a signature that uses a Photobucket image, change it or lose your signature.
• As I mentioned in the previous thread, your personal notepad at the bottom of your control panel will not get converted. Please save this. By sending it in a PM to yourself, for example.
• You can't start a conversation with yourself in Xenforo. Personally I find this ability to be rather handy, so if you want to be able to talk to yourself before I find a way to mod that nonsense, send a PM to yourself now while you still can.
• Make sure your can remember your password and that your e-mail works so you can recover your account if needed. In case something happens. 99% of you will just log in with your password as normal.
Conversion Issues and Other Notes.
• The way I've hacked the converter to do this means that there is a chance a few people's PMs with someone will get converted twice. Easier to just tell you to delete the excess than fix the rest of the code. >_>
• The sheer quantity of PMs means the PM conversion is going to take several days. It looks like it will be possible to engage in conversations in the mean time, but if you've got a high user ID with a high user ID partner, you won't see your conversations with them for awhile.
• I might lock private conversations for the duration to minimize confusion and 'why are my PMs gone!?' complaints.
• Xenforo doesn't really handle immense amounts of conversations - as many of us have - all that well. Addressing this will have to wait until after we've upgraded to 2.0 after the conversion.
• Xenforo doesn't support all of MyBB's BBCode. This will not be immediately addressed as the next step after conversion is finalized will be to upgrade to Xenforo 2. Some things will take a bit longer than others. So expect things to be ugly for a bit.
• Some BBCode just isn't going to work. The main culprit here is manually specifying dimensions. There are a few others (horizontal rules) that I'll need to make addons for.
• There will undoubtedly be hiccups post-conversion, especially before we upgrade to Xenforo 2.
When will the conversion take place?
Monday, May 28th.
How long will the site be down?
A few hours. Everything else converts very quickly, and the site can function while PMs are getting imported.
Why Xenforo?
1) MyBB is completely untenable for what most of you are using the site for. I have been stripping features for years, accordingly. The PM system is only the worst offender here. The heavy weight of integration that brought down the shoutbox, is another example.
2) Creating an appropriate converter for Elkarte would likewise take a great deal of time, and I think a big part of Blue Moon's relative strength is that it remains distinct from Elliquiy. I don't want to be running clones.
3) By going with an actively maintained piece of commercial software, I can make sure Blue Moon maintains a healthy number of features while remaining distinct from Elliquiy.
4) Xenforo has private conversations rather than PMs, which means after the conversion you will no longer have to rely on those quote towers so many of you love. More importantly, this is a properly normalized structure that is far more suitable to the sort of usage most members put this site to.
5) Like Elkarte, Xenforo has e-mail management built in, which takes an incredible load off of staff. There is no serious free alternative to this outside of Elkarte.
Read all of the bullet points carefully, please. Especially the action items one.
Stuff You May Want to Do.
• Accounts sharing an e-mail will be merged to the lowest user ID. Either setup a different e-mail for your alts, use subaccount tricks, or let them get merged.
• If you have not joined us on Discord you may want to do so. Staff won't be able to verify your postcount while we are upgrading.
• Elliquiy will still be open during the conversion. Being a gated forum, if you have an approval waiting there you may want to check your intro thread. Or wait.
• Save your buddy and ignore lists. found here. Xenforo has an ignore list but no buddy list. I will be looking at adding a buddy system in the future. For now though you will want to save the lists and hang onto them.
• Clear out your drafts. Especially for private conversations. Converting these properly is tricky and it's best just to not have any. PMs will either get fully converted (sent) or ignored by the converter, while post drafts will be converted as moderated posts.
• Linked avatars don't convert well - partly MyBB's fault. I highly suggest, if you linked your avatar rather than uploaded it, to download and upload your avatar instead before the conversion.
• Photobucket. Photobucket everywhere. It's pretty jarring after the conversion. If you see a post with the Photobucket curse, please report the post you see it in so we can excise Photobucket from that post and/or their profile.
• I will be blanking all Photobucket signatures before the conversion. If you have a signature that uses a Photobucket image, change it or lose your signature.
• As I mentioned in the previous thread, your personal notepad at the bottom of your control panel will not get converted. Please save this. By sending it in a PM to yourself, for example.
• You can't start a conversation with yourself in Xenforo. Personally I find this ability to be rather handy, so if you want to be able to talk to yourself before I find a way to mod that nonsense, send a PM to yourself now while you still can.
• Make sure your can remember your password and that your e-mail works so you can recover your account if needed. In case something happens. 99% of you will just log in with your password as normal.
Conversion Issues and Other Notes.
• The way I've hacked the converter to do this means that there is a chance a few people's PMs with someone will get converted twice. Easier to just tell you to delete the excess than fix the rest of the code. >_>
• The sheer quantity of PMs means the PM conversion is going to take several days. It looks like it will be possible to engage in conversations in the mean time, but if you've got a high user ID with a high user ID partner, you won't see your conversations with them for awhile.
• I might lock private conversations for the duration to minimize confusion and 'why are my PMs gone!?' complaints.
• Xenforo doesn't really handle immense amounts of conversations - as many of us have - all that well. Addressing this will have to wait until after we've upgraded to 2.0 after the conversion.
• Xenforo doesn't support all of MyBB's BBCode. This will not be immediately addressed as the next step after conversion is finalized will be to upgrade to Xenforo 2. Some things will take a bit longer than others. So expect things to be ugly for a bit.
• Some BBCode just isn't going to work. The main culprit here is manually specifying dimensions. There are a few others (horizontal rules) that I'll need to make addons for.
• There will undoubtedly be hiccups post-conversion, especially before we upgrade to Xenforo 2.
When will the conversion take place?
Monday, May 28th.
How long will the site be down?
A few hours. Everything else converts very quickly, and the site can function while PMs are getting imported.
Why Xenforo?
1) MyBB is completely untenable for what most of you are using the site for. I have been stripping features for years, accordingly. The PM system is only the worst offender here. The heavy weight of integration that brought down the shoutbox, is another example.
2) Creating an appropriate converter for Elkarte would likewise take a great deal of time, and I think a big part of Blue Moon's relative strength is that it remains distinct from Elliquiy. I don't want to be running clones.
3) By going with an actively maintained piece of commercial software, I can make sure Blue Moon maintains a healthy number of features while remaining distinct from Elliquiy.
4) Xenforo has private conversations rather than PMs, which means after the conversion you will no longer have to rely on those quote towers so many of you love. More importantly, this is a properly normalized structure that is far more suitable to the sort of usage most members put this site to.
5) Like Elkarte, Xenforo has e-mail management built in, which takes an incredible load off of staff. There is no serious free alternative to this outside of Elkarte.
