Bluelight Upgrade Updates

Thanks Cane, do I have you on AIM/Messenger? Add us 'hoptis', I might get a few of you to go through later today after plugins are stabilised.

Rosie, it's REAL BL No more testlight
Just testing on BL

To get on BL I have to add your IP's, which I'll do individually when you're available later. I still have a bunch of stuff to do which I'll do on Testlight first which will need testing... at this point I'm hoping to finish all the major stuff late tonight, Sunday night here. After which with some more testing and agreement all round, we can look at Monday to bring the site back to public... I am taking my time because 1.) I'm anal/meticulous and 2.) we don't often get the chance to have the site offline for this long 3.) the server has locked me out enough times *ragelol*

Gotta take a shower and go out to my work, be back in a couple of hours. Chris is taking a well deserved rest. More updates soon

In the meantime... there's not much you guys can do but if some of you are around later I have a heap more testing. Also, if Reed pops back in, let him know you're happy with the Aria skin and if he can grab it and send it to me would be good.

Those of you who aren't admins on TL, I've granted all existing admins there full/super admin status so you can upgrade other admins. If any of you can get on there and have a play, there's a lot of new settings/options (just don't run the maintenance tools if you don't know what you're doing).

Also, and I'll wait for Reed to chime in on this, but I don't see any harm in letting the smods onto TL, if they aren't already. Remember the backup there is from a few months ago so staff may be out of date.

Back later

Ronald I've PMd you (on here) my IP address so if you could please grant me access to BL I will have a look around and test all the links as well. Thanks mate!

Needed: admins to go through the usergroup permissions (Testlight should be fine) and double-check everything looks right in the usergroup permission settings. Then randomly check out a few forums, go to the moderator permissions, make sure everything appears "sane".

^ I've been checking through the drug forums but I can certainly look through those now.

hoptis wrote:Needed: admins to go through the usergroup permissions (Testlight should be fine) and double-check everything looks right in the usergroup permission settings. Then randomly check out a few forums, go to the moderator permissions, make sure everything appears "sane".

I've checked the permission settings of the usergroups in all of the main forums (so not the subforums, archives, etc.) and couldn't find any problems/inconsistencies.

This is all done one Testlight, will port all changes to BL when all good and ready.

Status of plugins from our previous version.

Skimlinks: disabled (new, for revenue, disabled for now)
DNSBL/Open Proxy Monitoring: no longer exists, using ACP Settings > Spam Management, personal key from Akismet to monitor spam... if we find this useful we should pay $5/month for the business version. It uses Akismet to recognise spam and moderate posts that match.
Product : Miserable Users: updated to version for 4.x
Product : Multiple Login Detector: no update, old version still works based on reports from vb.org, installed
Product : Moderator Statistics: old product gone new product added http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=236630, similar but not as good
Product : Reason for Closing Thread: gone no replacement, may have to custom code this later

This is all on Testlight, there's also a Google Doc in our bluelight.admin account with all these details. Settings for these plugins are in the ACP Options.

Hey,

Progress isn't going as well as I'd hoped. There have been some fairly fundamental changes to vBulletin and at this rate, it looks like we're not going to get everything up and ready when we go back online.

So far today I've done (all on TL)

mod_rewrite URLS: if you go to forums, threads and members, you'll notice the URL is a lot nicer than before. This isn't just for aesthetics, it greatly improves our visibility to search engines.

XML sitemap: another under the cover thing but our forum will now regularly generate xml sitemaps, once again another thing that search engines look kindly upon

Plugins: see my previous post. What we've salvaged will have to be good enough, I've no doubt the mods will miss the 'Close Thread reason' trick but we'll have to do without.

Attachments: while the site was offline, something we've been meaning to do for a while, dump all the attachments from the database unto the file system. Going forward this gives us opportunities to better host important files pdfs/docs related to drug studies for example

Home page: what you see on TL right now is how far I've gotten. The CMS is a lot to try and pick up and making the home page work and look like before was always going to be a tough ask. The news/announcements will be rolled into one blog-roll-like thing. You'll be able to promote articles from a thread (i.e. Drug Studies, DiTM, Announcements, etc.) or even write your own... getting the forum list to work might be painful. (Also, non-admins can't view the home page, anyone know wtf that is?)

(All of the above needs to be copied from TL to BL as well)

Staff contact list: probably isn't going to make it in time, we'll have to make do without (we did for years anyway )

Still to do: menu items that aren't relevant need to be removed, logo needs to be replaced/reworked, background color on notices needs to be changed, need to check registration is working as before (welcome wagon PM & email), PM's are okay...

If we get that skin we can throw it on and see how it looks, anything would be better than the default.

Also: there's a quick and dirty mobile skin Chris dropped on the server we might be able to throw up and please someone remind me to put Google Analytics code back on BL before it goes public!

I need rest, my fingers are too cold to type and I have to start looking for work this week.

Well, I'm so glad to hear progress is being made.
I'll be offline for most of tomorrow again.
Will check in , in the morning and then again at night.
I'm off of work Tues and will be online then.

hoptis wrote:
Staff contact list: probably isn't going to make it in time, we'll have to make do without (we did for years anyway )

Yeah, I doubt anyone will notice/mind. We can do the staff contact list later

hoptis wrote:
If we get that skin we can throw it on and see how it looks, anything would be better than the default.

Also: there's a quick and dirty mobile skin Chris dropped on the server we might be able to throw up and please someone remind me to put Google Analytics code back on BL before it goes public!

I believe Chris has purchased the Blue Aria skin already? Any chance of putting that on to see how it looks? Or are you just going to put it straight on when BL goes live?

Quick response:

Handjobs for chris and hoptis

I would like to see us putting out some sort of indicator on our status and health with this upgrade. I am uncomfortable having thousands of users left in the dark, and the crazy shit they'll dream up and circulate based on imaginings rather than facts. It could be a twitter feed, but I think editing our offline status page image (kudos on the one put up earlier using rageface etc), that indicates how far we've gotten, and more importantly when we think we'll be back up - something like this would reach a lot more people than just our twitter feed.

'Push to smods' was meaning I wanted this thread moved to their forum. However, the content has evolved and grown beyond the FYI they'd need. Moreover, they'd have the same info as anyone else should we put it on our 'status' page.

Hoptis asked my thoughts on granting TL (or BL proper, via IPs?) access - fuck yes. More eyes and hands in there, the faster we find issues and get them resolved. Hell, maybe we can find some talent that will help fix some of these things as well

I know hoptis has been hammering away on plug-ins and general upgrade info. I had promised to help with what I could, but time has not permitted me thus far to do much. I'll be on site tonight for a few hours, and will report back here with what I find.




I support the cautious approach hoptis has, and would rather keep a far out date and surprise everyone by getting it wrapped up early over giving a date and then pushing it out, and pushing it out. I'd say to hold the THUR date for now, so long as we still believe that's more than achievable. Getting the smods in to help look things over and get adjusted will help bring it to a close. Additionally, and admin (and probably smods) ought take a look at info on the vb site for update logs to know what'll be different. I'd hoped to give some links to the change logs, but I'm coming up empty right now. Anyone else can take a look at vbulletin.com and-or I'll see what I can provide tonight.

Reed, not sure what you did on TL but permissions for the home page are fixed. Thanks

Awesome!

I haven't even gone over there yet. Man, I rock!


Talk about a confidence booster.

Thanks for updating twitter and great work so far, guys.

Just updated our Twitter:

"Server has been migrated and updated. More tweaking and testing to follow but we're well on our way to returning in a couple of days!"

Would update the status page but I'm locked out again.

New skin is installed on Testlight, you can check it out anytime, thanks to Chris for supplying that.

Home page: still working on it, I've done a lot of reading up/learning on vBulletin 4 in the last 24 hours, have a much better idea of how to finish off Home and even perhaps to sneak in the staff contact list, either before or shortly after launch. Feeling a lot more confident that this is going to go well. You can see an example of using plugins, templates and widgets to create the 'Features' box on the Home of Testlight's default skin. Wish I'd had time to set all this up before the move but I really didn't, there is an element of trial-and-error with some of the stuff I'm doing but don't really see a way around that, plus the more I pick up, the more other stuff I can do.

Still on home, what I'm working on on TL is what will be the final design in terms of home page, articles that appear in the first box, gonna have to play with settings to make it look great but they're meant to replace our Front Page forum and Announcements and DiTM front page.. still needs a bit more work before I ask for a fairly rigorous round of testing to BL. Where it says 'Post to Article' next to a post, I'll leave it to you guys to see if this can be turned off, at least for-non staff, for now I think anly Admins should be allowed to post new Articles.

You can start expecting things to get a little exciting in the new 48 hours.

Else: job hunting and 3 hours on PR, it's still not up yet either.

Also updated our status and redirect page.

TLB wrote:Quick response:
Additionally, and admin (and probably smods) ought take a look at info on the vb site for update logs to know what'll be different. I'd hoped to give some links to the change logs, but I'm coming up empty right now. Anyone else can take a look at vbulletin.com and-or I'll see what I can provide tonight.

I'll write up a summary when we go public, one for members and one for staff.

The changes aren't drastic but on a day-to-day level will definitely affect every staff member.

PS. The latest version of the manual is always here:

https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/

But I don't expect you to read it , or even a changelog.

If someone has time free, I'd love it if they could test (or try and figure out how to) test the Akismet plugin in the new Spam Management setting.

Cane2theLeft wrote:I've checked the permission settings of the usergroups in all of the main forums (so not the subforums, archives, etc.) and couldn't find any problems/inconsistencies.

Did you try logging in as members of different usergorups as well? Remember you can change any random BL'ers password on TL.... we always need to be on our toes when making modifications that the existing security hierarchy of the forums is still being implemented properly.

Also, can someone familiar with Blogs go through the Blog settings, in the ACP they're off in their own area but keep your eyes peeled for any new functionality we may need to turn off and implement more carefully later.

More nap time but a heap of testing is coming up very soon!

Hoptis, you know best what Blogs looks like BEHIND the scenes- but I can for sure check it out and see if things appear as they should.
I just got home from work but will likely check it in a few, but may not get back to responding on it all until tomorrow.

Edit: Hoptis, I'm looking through regular bluelight, not TL-BL and Blogs does not have the Guidelines or Mods listed.
Also, I don't see the little bar where I can select to view the new skins??? Do I need to be logged into Testlight and not BL?

Can't log into testlight b/c Chris had changed my password and I don't remember it :\
Chris if you see this, or Hoptis, if you can- please let me know what my pw is Thanks.


Edit: Also, when viewing Testlight- it differs from BL where BL has a Blogs tab at the top w/ 'Forums' and 'Home' and such- Will we be keeping the Blogs tab or are you getting rid of that? I think it would be awesome to keep it.

^^ PMd

Testlight isn't showing up with the Aria Blue skin for me??

^^It may not be the default, you may have to set it (I expect the little pulldown like we had in the bottom left corner on Old BL?).



For me....I still can't connect. wtf.

ocean wrote:Can't log into testlight b/c Chris had changed my password and I don't remember it :\
Chris if you see this, or Hoptis, if you can- please let me know what my pw is Thanks.

http://testlight.bluelight.ru/vb/login.php?do=lostpw

You can test out that functionality while you're at it.

It's not working.

I tried 5-6 times :\