New KiwiSDR forum: differences and features
Welcome to the new KiwiSDR forum, hosted on kiwisdr.com and running the latest Vanilla 3.3 forum software.
All of the forum content from valentfx.com was copied over including attachments, avatars, inboxes etc.
The most problematic issue will be external links from other places pointing to specific forum posts. Forum links were previously of the form valentfx.com/vanilla/discussion/... and need to be changed to the form forum.kiwisdr.com/discussion/... This is of course impossible for immutable (non-editable) content like links embedded in Twitter tweets. It was not possible to automatically redirect references from the Valent forum for various reasons. So if you have editable links into the old forum please update them. However, links to old posts on Valent will continue to work as long as Valent hosts the old KiwiSDR content.
Also, the time to edit your posts is not limited on this forum (previously the limit was one day). So if your post contains a link back to Valent you can simply edit it to correct the link per the above. In theory this shouldn't be necessary as the database was scrubbed very carefully to update all the links.
The forum has a slightly different look but basically the same features. The biggest change is editing posts. There is no longer a "preview" button. When using the new paragraph icon on the left margin, and also when double-clicking on words and making text selections, the formatting changes are immediate. It is a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface. Experiment and you'll see how it works.
The search box is at top right. Use the "Mark All Viewed" button on the top bar as all the previous viewed information has been reset.
If you are having any problems (e.g. can't login, can't post, getting error messages, etc.) please email support@kiwisdr.com
Comments
New forum users: When you first register on the forum your application will have to be manually approved instead of simply confirming your email. While waiting for approval you will still be able to read the forum, just not make any new posts (the "New Discussion" button will not appear). When your registration is approved you may or may not receive a confirmation email. Just wait for the button to appear.
I disliked the original skin here last week but this new one is quite nice.
I couldn't figure out how to move the sidebar to the right as we had previously. Otherwise it's fairly close.
The move process was an absolute bear. I had to learn a little about SQL, myPHPAdmin, and a bunch more about PHP itself. The automated migration scripts did nothing for the embedded links which had to be patched by hand-built scripts and custom database loads. Awful.
I had a couple forum systems working but not enough attendees to bother with so nothing for a couple years. I started out on Landline BBS's 30 years ago
From outside, it looked for me like a very straight and smooth migration.
By the way, ...
"The automated migration scripts did nothing for the embedded links which had to be patched by hand-built scripts and custom database loads."
There would have been a very simple way to do (local) link conversion without the need of database manipulation and/or changing multiple string occurrences. I'm talking about mod_substitute (if you're using Apache; other webserver software may have equal features, but I'm only familiar with Apache).
With mod_subtitute, the whole URL conversion can be done globally at a single point (Apache configuration file or .htaccess) and could be something like
Substitute 's|https: //<olddomain>|https: //<newdomain>|nq'
(Without the blanks after https:, of course.) This tells Apache to change each ocurrence of the specified string "on the fly" during output.
Anyway, thanks for all your effort, John! KiwiSDR is such a great project, I like it!
@dl7awl: Yes, but no. I was aware of that mechanism. But a simple domain change was not sufficient. The subdirectory structure of the links themselves needed significant change. While it might have been possible to develop such a set of mod_substitute rules it would have required careful testing to make sure they worked and all the cases were caught.
It was about as much effort to search and edit the upload files used in the database construction. That way I could be certain everything was correct. I developed a pile of Unix
sedtransformations to accomplish this. Almost identical to what mod_substitute would require I believe.Anyway, I had to learn about SQL for other reasons. For example the migration scripts didn't move the "reaction" data at all (where you can mark posts as "helpful" or "awesome"). All that data would have been lost. So I figured out how to export/import the correct database tables manually. The table format changed between Vanilla versions (old = 2.5, new = 3.3) so the import data had to be edited as well.
Today I stumbled across another point:
"All of the forum content from valentfx.com was copied over including attachments, avatars, inboxes etc."
In this thread I didn't find the pdf attachment mentioned in the opening post. Maybe a single case, I didn't check that. And surely not a real problem, as long as the old valentfx forum exists. I was able to download it there; I just wanted to inform you.
Best regards,
Manfred
Thanks Manfred. Yes, there seems to be a major problem with all the old attachments now being disconnected from their associated messages. All the attachment files are still in the upload directory. And all the attachment media info is still in the database.
But the PHP code for Vanilla 3.3 has changed significantly and now when a message is displayed the attachments are not. Inline images are fine. And attachments to new messages are okay. I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out what's wrong. No luck so far. The specific .pdf attachment you mentioned I added back by hand.
I see your tests, and I'm sorry to see that you have so much trouble with the attachments.
Did you consider to workaround all needs of investigating the new code by writing a shell script which does automatically what you did manually here, namely looking up all posting-file-connections in the old forum and then inserting according links into the respective posts here? That should be relatively easy and an acceptable solution for old posts.
Since I'm lazy by nature, this would probably be my way. 😉
Okay, after way too much effort I think attachment links are working again. There were 584 such attachments in the database and I have been spot checking the comments containing them. If you notice anything amiss please let me know.
Great, thank you!
Thanks John! Take the rest of the day off :-)
Hello,
I am a new kiwisdr owner. When I registered for this forum the signup process asked me a security question:
“What is seven plus three divided by two?”
According to order of operations you would divider 3 by 2 to get 1.5 and then add 7 to it for an answer of 8.5.
This was not accepted by the forum registration process so I instead added 7 and 3 and then divided by 2 and answered 5 and this worked.
I recognize this is silly to post, and I guess math word problems are different than equations. Just thought I'd mention it.
Thanks,
Joseph W6JHP
Where are those pesky parenthesis when you need them?