VaBeach_Guy

6 minutes ago, Jim M said:

Nope. That button I told you about would only rebuild Achievements. However, this will only count based on what is in your database.

If it's something that I can manually adjust (the ranks), that might be easier. Some may want to keep it as is, while some may want it adjusted. 

5 minutes ago, Jim M said:

After upgrade, you will want to set your rules to how you like them and then rebuild the achievements by going to ACP -> Members -> Achievements -> Settings -> Rebuild Members' Achievements.

Rebuilding will also rebuild things like post count and reputation, right? That would create bigger issues for me. My board was originally owned by an NFL team. In 2020, they decided that they didn't want to pay for it anymore (after 20 to 25 years in existence). So we members branched off and re-created the board.

Since most of the members had decades of post count and reputation built up, I manually added all of their old stats to the new board. So if rebuilding also re-adjusts all of those numbers, I'd be in a world of hurt lol. 

10 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

In what way? If you let us know what is causing you a headache, we can certainly advise accordingly

Just trying to learn a new system, read about the 'rules' and such. My members aren't crazy about it. We'll get used to it, but nobody likes change lol. 

The upgrade turned everyone into 'newbies', so they're wondering what's going on there. Someone with 150,000 posts has the same rank as someone with 4 or 5 posts lol. 

I just have to figure out what determines rank, and maybe manually adjust everyone accordingly. 

Kind of along the same lines as this, is there a way to show the exact number of posts as opposed to a rounded off number. I know it will show when you hover over it, but we want the full number to show if possible. 

I just upgraded, and this system of rules and points, gives me a headache. 

2 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

You can turn it on/off as you see fit.  So you could have it off, and turn it on....  then decide to turn it off for a year...  then come back and enable it again.  (This time even changing where the data is stored theoretically.)

Now... again, it does not happen instantly.  It can take days/weeks to complete depending on how many topics need to be changed and how busy your board is.  So it's not something to just randomly change every few hours.  

I found what I'd read:

It's when I try to unarchive an individual thread, I get that message. I archived it in a place where I don't want it, so I was going to unarchive it to move it into the correct place. Not a real big deal, but I'd rather have it in its proper place. 

28 minutes ago, Jim M said:

Unarchiving is ran as a background task in order to not bring down your community/server. This would continue either way. It may be more efficient on the latest release just because 4.4 is quite some time ago 🙂 . I would upgrade then unarchive, personally. Though, it shouldn't really matter.

Thanks, my concern was that maybe something may have changed and unarchiving wouldn't be possible after the upgrade. 

If I do unarchive, those posts can't be re-archived in the future? I believe I saw that somewhere.

4 minutes ago, Jim M said:

Keep in mind that an archived topic also can't be replied to. 

If the bulk of your traffic and activity come from select topics, it sounds like this is just your server lacking to keep up with performance your activity needs. Next time this happens, you may wish to have your hosting provider review what is happening on the server-side. This way that will give you a better understanding of what is happening.

Another thing to look into if you receive a lot of guest views is some sort of caching via a CDN like CloudFront, CloudFlare, etc... which can cache non-logged in users and display that to take load off your server.

All of this is really outside our scope as a software vendor but if there are any questions, I would advise creating your own topic.

It only happens on select topics that have grown to a large size or on topics that are experiencing a lot of simultaneous activity (during an NFL game, for instance). Looking at what's going on in the moment, on the server, I don't seen any spikes or unusual activity to indicate a strain on the server. Of course, I'm no expert on such things so I could be seeing something and not understand what it's telling me. 

Archiving (almost 700,000 posts), alleviated the issue but created this new (to us) issue. 

Unarchiving may be the only solution. I'm about to upgrade from 4.4.10 to the latest edition. If I upgrade before unarchiving (if that's my choice), should I do it before the upgrade? Would the upgrade prevent me from unarchiving after the upgrade is done?

On 10/10/2022 at 2:38 PM, Daniel F said:

As I mentioned in my last reply, it can't be done.

One of the reasons to use the archive feature is to clean up the search index.

Could you explain what you're trying to achieve? Why do you want to archive something? Maybe there's a better solution than the archive feature.

If I may jump into the conversation (on my own behalf), my site isn't 'huge' (1.2+ Million posts, almost 1700 members). It's a board for an NFL team, so we do get a good bit of activity, especially on gameday, draft day and so on. 

Some threads begin to move very slowly when there's 500 to 1,000 people viewing/posting on it at one time or when the thread grows to a couple thousand pages. So I enabled archiving to ease the stress on the database. 

Now, the archived posts can't be searched, and people want to search for old posts/topics. I hadn't realized (initially), that searching wouldn't work or that it would pose a problem. 

If there's a better solution to this, I'd be grateful to learn of it.  

This topic is along the lines of a question I have, though not entirely. 

Is there a way for members to actually search archived posts to reference old conversations and such? Is there a good solution for that?

42 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

It is only for the thread starter. It changes the author for the very first post of the topic.

Ok, thanks. Am I correct about my workaround? I should be able to make individual posts, alter them, then merge them into one thread and when all is said and done, I'll have the end results that I ultimately want.  

I have a question about functionality. 

From the description:

Quote

2) Change Author.

When clicked upon it will display the topic author with the option to select a new author. After the changes are saved, the topic info will be updated accordingly to reflect the new author. The new changes will be updated in the search and activity page as well.

You have the options to descrease old author 's post count and increase the post count of the new author.

That specifies 'topic author', does that mean that only the thread starter can be changed or can each and every post starter be changed?

I'm wanting to re-create a thread from 5 years ago (which I have locally archived), from a now dead board. So I want to re-post each and every post and change it's date, time and poster to what the original thread was. 

If it's only for the topic starter and not for each individual poster, I suppose I could do a workaround where I post each post as its own thread, change the data then merge them all into one thread. 

Any progress on this, we can't get it to embed either and we're looking for a solution. 

7 hours ago, Miss_B said:

Yes, that is correct. 

Thanks, once my upgrade is complete, I'll begin work on my project. 

On 5/30/2022 at 5:55 PM, Miss_B said:

In that case the only option is to post the topics manually.

 

If you want to change the topic starters and start date, I have developed an app for that. You can see it here:

 

@Adriano Faria has another similiar app that changes the posts date. You can see it here:

 

 

I see that these say that they're compatible with 4.7, I assume that includes sub-revisions (4.7.6 and so on)?

All these months later, I'm (hopefully) going to be able to begin on my project soon. 

7 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

If you use my app. it includes the start time/date of the topics only. Posts are not supported.

Thanks, I may end up using both of them, if they will achieve the final results that I want. Which is being able to re-create those threads, giving each post the proper poster and date/time (which was actually a little over 3 years before our new board was created). 

5 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

In that case the only option is to post the topics manually.

 

If you want to change the topic starters and start date, I have developed an app for that. You can see it here:

 

@Adriano Faria has another similiar app that changes the posts date. You can see it here:

 

That looks like it may be my easiest (and only) solution. With the changing of the posting dates, does that include the time as well as the date? 

18 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

Do you have a database backup of the time of those topics? This is very difficult to do, even if you have a backup. But if you do not have a database backup containing those topics, then I am afraid it is not possible.

 

No, I tried to get the franchise to give me the database of the old board, but 'legal' wouldn't allow it due to 'privacy' issues. Even if they deleted all members first, they still wouldn't do it. But that was right as Covid was breaking out and they had other things to deal with. 

I remember years (and years) ago, being able to alter the date/time stamp and even member numbers, using MyPHPAdmin, so I was hoping that there may be a way to do it there. 

If I were to copy and paste each post manually, where every post is made by me, is there a way to go into the database and alter each post to reflect a different time/date and poster?

That would be very time consuming, but something that I'm willing to undertake, if it's possible. 

I'm not sure if this can be done, or how if it can be. But let me explain...

I was a longtime member of the Philadelphia Eagles official message board (20+ years). In 2020, the Eagles decided to do away with their board in favor of Reddit (supposedly). 

Many of the members and I decided to re-create the board and run it ourselves. Which we've been doing since April 20, 2020 (we're closing in on 1,000,000 posts within the next month or so).

On the old, official board, there were a few threads that were important to the community (or at least to me and a few others). Mainly, threads relating to Super Bowl LII. 

Before the old board went black (they gave us 2 weeks notice of the impending doom), I archived as much of the board as I could (via Archive.org). I also locally archived a few of the more 'important' threads to my hard drive using HTTrack.

So I have archived copies of a few threads that are available to me and I even converted one of them into a standalone webpage, so that it can be read (the Super Bowl LII Gameday Thread). 

So my question is this... is there any way of 'importing' those archived threads into our new database? If not, is there a way that I could 're-create' those threads in the database manually and attributing each post to the correct original poster, and further adjusting the date stamp so that it gives the proper posting date/time of the original post?

Doing it manually (if possible), would be a task and a half, but one that I could undertake over the course of time. 

I hope I've explained that well enough to get my goal across.  

From about 2003 until last year, or maybe 2019, I used a custom portal. I got tired of having to come up with a new portal solution with each upgrade though. So now, I just use the main forum index as my homepage. 

Turned out that the 'portal' was only really 'important' to me and my members actually prefer the forum index. 

Yeah, I had the same thing happen when I upgraded to an earlier version, and I too was astonished. I want to say that it had something to do with search functions but I don't remember exactly now. 

With regard to the ignore feature, is there a way to also ignore those ignored users quotes when some other member quotes the ignored user's posts? Current, people can ignore each other but if I or someone else quotes that ignored user, the member who is ignoring the ignored member, has his/her quotes visible. 

On 6/30/2020 at 1:55 PM, Morgin said:

Who is your ad provider? With Adsense, you certainly can. It’s in the Adsense settings (they change things around frequently so I don’t actually recall specifically where, but it’s there). Other providers I’m not sure, but any good ad networks usually allows you to block certain categories of ads. 

It's Adsense. 

How can I block specific types of ads? Specifically, political type ads. Or can that even be done?

4 hours ago, burnyourfeelings said:

If you wanna move to 4.4.10 you need php 7.1 or higher but wit 7.1 its works great. Just copy the files of 4.4.10 in your forum directory ( do not copy conf_global ) and then go to /admin/upgrade and run the upgrade. But your theme will no longer work among with other plugins  / apps you have on the 3.4.8 ! I can do a video tutorial if you want.

I tried to upgrade to 4.4.10 using 7.4 and couldn't do it. So I submitted a support ticket and was told to downgrade to PHP 7.3 because 7.4 wasn't supported for 4.4.10. It will be supported in 4.5, though.

So when upgrading your php version, keep that in mind.