When I asked on the forums, my post was ignored by IPS in the feedback forum, having waited until the new blogs etc. came out and still nothing. I then asked in a ticket and was told it was not an official skin at all and it was a community skin, and that it was dependant upon the community. It was only when I pointed out Lindy's post above that they agreed it was an official skin, but gave no indication of when it would be updated.
I am disappointed with IPS on this skin as they promised it in 3.0.3 (I think) and since then we have had a couple of beta versions and nothing since 3.0.5 was released. It looks poor here and reflects badly on Ehren who originally crafted the skin and won the competition that IPS ran last summer.
All very sad and not up to the usual standard of IPS on what is an excellent skin.
There are some trolls on the board. Your first post I could understand someone giving you a negative rep because you seem impatient in it. But after that, it's just ridiculous. (Now watch, I'll get negative rep for what I just now said.)
I gave you a few + reps to help you out some (except the first post). Someone else is giving you + points too but I don't know who.
How about an addition to this, on the registration screen let the user, choose a RANDOM generated password (based on what they want) - than have it e-mailed to them (incase they ever forget).
I searched in my admin panel, but couldn't find this feature; I was wondering if you can add the option to disallow potential members to signup using the same password as their username (username=password)? This is a big security issue with forums at the moment as you could just extract the member names and bruteforce the forum. The current "login security system" does not block this even if you dont use proxy servers, due to the fact that you are targeting seperate member accounts instead of the same member account.
I know that it is plain stupid to use the same username as your password, but there are just many people out there who still prefer to do that to remember their password easily.
It's probably easier to just have password enforcement options the admin can set than getting into user-level options. We can look into this for a future version.
Hey guys,
So I'm not an expert (in anything), but I've been running a few pretty active forums for almost 8 years now (most of these years were IP.Board!). I've had to endure several server moves. I wanted to write a brief outline of my experience, since moving an active forum to a new server isn't the easiest thing in the world.
The dilemma with moving an active forum is that:
a) because it's active, you don't want your many users to tolerate any downtime.
b) because it's active, chances are your DB is huge and so this increases the time required to move over, and the potential downtime.
Moving a forum entails a few things:
1) Getting the code up and running on your new server
2) Getting the database moved over to your new server
3) Pointing your users at the new server. I'll assume you're sticking with the same domain so this will be just a DNS flick.
Solution #1: You could blindly do these three steps, but you'll be faced with a bunch of issues. The main one is that you will have two servers running off of different DB's, and there's no way to guarantee that the DNS change propagates at the same time for all your users. You'll have people posting and browsing the old forum, and people posting and browsing the new forum. Any changes to the "old" forum will disappear once everyone has propagated over to the new forum. Unacceptable.
Downtime: None.
Discrepancy: Yes.
Solution #2: To prevent the discrepancy between having and old and new forums running, you could just turn your board "offline" during the propagation period. The procedure would be:
a) turn the board offline on the old server
b) move the code/DB over
c) wait for propagation period
d) turn the board online again on the new server.
This will prevent your users from wondering where their posts went, but you have to remain offline for the DNS propagation period (which is on the order of hours, and reportedly can be even more). Again, unacceptable, because you don't want to be down for hours.
Downtime: Several hours, but you can post a nice message.
Discrepancy: None
Solution #3: Point both servers at one DB (DB-copy). The procedure is:
a) Setup/copy all code to the new server
b) Turn your forum offline.
c) Copy your DB over to the new forum
d) Point both servers code to the DB on the new server
e) Turn your forum online.
f) Flip the DNS switch and wait for propagation.
By pointing both servers at one database, you guarantee no discrepancy. That way, whether users are accessing the old or new server when DNS propagates, they will see the same things. You only need turn your forum off for the duration of DB copy, which you can probably pull-off in less than an hour, depending on the size of the DB.
Downtime: Probably on the order of minutes, and you get to post a nice message.
Discrepancy: None
Solution #4: Point both servers at one DB (DB-replication). The procedure is:
a) Setup/copy all code to the new server
b) Setup master->slave replication between the old and new DB's
c) Point both servers' code to the DB on the new server (which is the slave)
d) Cancel the master/slave replication on both servers
e) Flip the DNS switch and wait for propagation.
Essentially, this is the same as solution #3 but instead of having to turn the board off, you rely on MySQL's replication functionality, which lets your new DB mirror your old one. The one issue is that replication requires a bit of technical know-how. There's a good guide here. Also, that you will have a bit of cross-server traffic (for the DB replication, and from the old server's code to the new server's DB during propagation).
I just tried this on a site with several GB's worth of MySQL DB (forum, etc) with zero downtime as far as my users are concerned. A completely transparent move.
Downtime: None
Discrepancy: None
The devil is always in the details, and I didn't go into any of the technical ones. There's some good guides around about how to carry-out any of these steps, and they'd probably do a better job than I can. I just wanted to point out that there is a process whereby you can move a large, active forum in a way that's transparent to your users.
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