Things We Lost in the Import

The import from the locally hosted phpbb board at xeno-underground.net to the externally hosted forumotion board here wasn't perfect.  I'd like to keep a list of things that got dropped for imported accounts.  If you're an imported user and you've found something new to put on this list, please reply to this topic!

We will do our best to make things better with what we've been given to work with, but for now, we're stuck with what we have as per Forumotion's Terms of Service topic regarding Forums Import - https://www.forumotion.com/terms-of-service

Here's a link to the old board if you need it.

1. Activation Status - Basically, when all the accounts were imported, they were put to sleep.  You must request a password reset to re-activate your account.  I made a rudimentary tutorial for that here.
   
2. Avatar - You're just going to have to re-upload it.  You can now navigate to the old board to get your old one!
   
3. Signature - Check your signature for bad code.  A lot of links and pictures got mangled.
   
4. Birthdate Entry - Since Forumotion uses a French date system, it clashed with the original bbs' format, so dates were scrambled.
   
5. Private Message History - This didn't carry over, either. You can now navigate to the old board to get to your history!
   
6. Forum Theme - We can only have one layout here, unfortunately.  :c  We're very open to suggestions based on member feedback for layouts and features that they want, tho.
   

Does PM history count? I just wanted to look up something in mine and realised it's nowhere to be found. Unless I've just really missed something in the new layout?

Augh, I guess that got dropped as well! Damn it. I'll PM you here about your PMs over there!

I am happy as long as the forum lives on but I also noticed that all PMs was gone...

Awrighty!
I've unlocked the old board so that peeps can look at their PMs and avatars - http://xeno-underground.net/bbs

I am sorry that the transfer has been so difficult.

By comparison, it could have been much worse, though! All the forum posts and members came over in-tact, which was my main concern.

It took me a few days to get around to reading this forum and figuring out why I couldn't log in.

Hey Ben!
Was there anything we could have done on our end to speed up your account retrieval?

katimus_prime wrote:Hey Ben!
Was there anything we could have done on our end to speed up your account retrieval?

No, this was purely an incidence of me being stupid and forgetting what email I made the account with.

O! Thanks for "unlocking" the PMs katimus_prime!

Do we have only this one skin for forum or there is some place where it can be change?

kare_reiko wrote:Do we have only this one skin for forum or there is some place where it can be change?

Yes, unfortunately, we only have one skin on Forumotion.  We can build three at a time, but we can only set one of them active at a time. Was there a specific feature of the layout you used on the old board that you wanted here? If it's a small enough fix, I can try to see about getting myself or stitched or leah to build it in.

^ What Kat said! I can definitely try to fix the current layout if there's something missing from it. Also let me know if you have any suggestions in general! The skin we're using was modified from an existing one and I kinda figured out how to do it as I went along, so it's probably not perfect. ^^;

No, it's just my eyes somehow hurt with this colors mix, don't worry, I will just put on my glasses more often

Oh gosh, I'm so sorry! I know I have a tendency to use painfully bright colors in everything, so if it's uncomfortable to look at, I can probably tone it down a bit.

katimus_prime wrote:

kare_reiko wrote:Do we have only this one skin for forum or there is some place where it can be change?

Yes, unfortunately, we only have one skin on Forumotion.  We can build three at a time, but we can only set one of them active at a time.  Was there a specific feature of the layout you used on the old board that you wanted here?  If it's a small enough fix, I can try to see about getting myself or stitched or leah to build it in.

Actually, if you create a back up forum, there is some coding you can do to have two themes--the main one and the back up (whichever theme you have on the back up forum)-- to choose from. =) There is a tutorial on it.

Oh man, I forgot I even had an account here |D School does that to you, but yeah!

Leah, that sounds great! I just need to find the time to slow down and take a look.
Welcome back, Arubedo! :3

Hi there! Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I was trying to read forum content dating to 2014, and the formatting is so weird as to make the posts nearly unreadable. Links are either truncated or exploded into uselessness, there are two line breaks following every starting quotation mark, and so forth. I'm guessing this is a side-effect of the import, and maybe there's nothing that can be done about it, but I felt there was no harm in asking.

Reichu wrote:Hi there! Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I was trying to read forum content dating to 2014, and the formatting is so weird as to make the posts nearly unreadable. Links are either truncated or exploded into uselessness, there are two line breaks following every starting quotation mark, and so forth. I'm guessing this is a side-effect of the import, and maybe there's nothing that can be done about it, but I felt there was no harm in asking.

Yeah, something I'm noticing with a lot of older posts containing anything other than plain text is that there's something up with anything that uses a \ or a /. Since the import has come and gone, I don't think there's anything that can be done en masse to old content unless I take a month and go through all of them and shine them up (which I don't have time to do). I just learned that \ is what is known as an escape character in one of my Javascript courses, so it's treated differently in order to get certain plaintext stuff to display properly.

tl;dr, I think we have to deal with it, but if you wanted to give yourself a better preview, you could draft up a reply from the quoted text and edit out the badness and hit preview again until it was legible. Sometimes I'll take an old post and make it not-broken-anymore because I necro it.

Yeah, I noticed that too. If I have some time, maybe I'll start going through and cleaning up some of the old posts or at least try to make a dent in it.

Thanks, Stitched! Since attention is being focused on it, I'm gonna poke at the Gears section.

stitchedmoon wrote:Yeah, I noticed that too.  If I have some time, maybe I'll start going through and cleaning up some of the old posts or at least try to make a dent in it.

Welp, a year late and a couple bucks short, but I'm slowly working on fixing the posts that got mutilated in the import. :B  (Shoutout to the two glasses of wine I drank last night that made me randomly decide to start in on this.  See, alcoholism can be functional.)  I think I got most of the Creative Works section done, and I'm going through the Announcements now.

Issues I've noticed so far:

• <br> tags (a line break in HTML) and weird characters inserted into URLs, causing the links and image tags to break
  
• line breaks after certain punctuation marks interrupting paragraphs of text (as Reichu noted above)
  
• some of the BBCodes and smileys for the old forum don't work on the new one (so depending on the circumstance, I've either replaced those with the closest equivalent or just let it stand as-is, for archive reasons)
  
• broken images and links that are no longer available (mostly left these as they were, just cleaned up the line breaks that got dropped into the URLs)
  
• some of the borked code/formatting was so wacky it was actually mangling the layout of the thread??  Like the purple bars and footers of the post were all over the place, haha.
  

I've still got a lot of work cut out for me, and I know things have been pretty slow around here, but hopefully this will go towards making the older posts more readable and navigable.  I'll probably bump this thread again if/whenever I get closer to being done, but in the meantime, if you see something out of whack, lemme know? :3c

Mini-bump! Forum Administration section (the Announcements, Welcome Area, and Suggestion Box) is mostly cleaned up. I'll probably go through and work on the remaining boards in the order they're listed, unless anyone wants me to focus on a particular section as a priority. But I think I'm gonna take a break for tonight, because combing through all those posts is giving me the tetris effect and I have a feeling I'll be editing out line breaks in my sleep. @m@