Later today (or possibly one evening this week) - I'll be upgrading to Invision Board 2.3
The board will get switched off - the new content uploaded - and then an upgrade actioned - which should be a few hours at most. If you see the board acting strange during this period - don't email me - and don't try and post to the forum once the upgrade has started until you see this thread updated with news that the upgrade is complete.
In the event of emergency - we have the UMSF lifeboat here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/unmannedspaceflight/
If the proverbial has hit the fan - I'll post about it there.
Fingers crossed
Doug
The upgrade is basically done - obviously there will need to be some tidying up - logo's etc - but the forum is functional again
Doug
Congratulations - a thing like that takes a lot of courage...but I guess it's not your first time.
You know - the forum's still closed....we could just talk about EVERYONE in here before we open it again Oops....too late
Damn - too late
Doug
Thanks for not providing an anxiety provoking warning of this upgrade, say, oh, about a month ago.
[laugh]
Technically - I sort of did : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=4486&view=findpost&p=97065 - but I just did it a LOT later than I thought I would back then.
Doug
O.K. Well done Doug... as an Data application admin I know that You should never change/upgrade a running system
No problem. I am fully capable of having a retroactive anxiety attack.
[shudder]
[pulse racing]
[swoon]
Hello Doug,
Glad to see the forum back. For the past 24 hours or so I haven't been receiving any email updates from a topic I'm tracking. Is this something with my email or with the forum?
While I'm here another question. When I send a PM I would think it would appear in the PM "Sent" folder. However that folder is empty. Is this feature working?
BTW I enjoyed hearing you on Planetary Radio recently...
Thanks,
What do these colored figures by the poster's name represent? They seem to be mostly red, gray for some people and occasionally green/blue. Is that online status or something?
P.S. The "Front Page" is disabled, something about admin settings.
I was also wondering about the colored figures, so I tried to go to the "portal" to see who was online. I got a message telling me that "The portal has not been enabled. Please check your Invision Power Board Admin Settings." Perhaps that was intentional, but I thought I'd mention it. Otherwise everything else seems ok.
It's like getting a new version of Office - you suddenly find things that are new, and discover settings that have changed. The portal should be active again now - still got some stuff to figure out and tweak
Doug, I'm not able to upload image attachments with the new version. In the little Attachments sub-window I hit "Browse..." to select the file, and then hit the green "UPLOAD" button. (It says I have used 0 bytes of a 1MB limit.) Then the subwindow clears and displays the message "Uploading File...", but nothing further happens.
Could this be a browser issue? I'm using Mozilla 1.7.10.
Also regarding image attachments, it seems like many of them cannot be viewed without logging in - though this might just be me.
I must say that having a "portal" is much more fun for we space aficionados (and sci-fi fans) than a plain old "front page."
The upgraded message editor looks pretty nice. It looks as if we have some new formating options. Hmm, I wonder what it means to insert: Spoiler? That could be fun.
I don't know if this is something you can turn on and off or not, but the new forum is missing a feature I found useful in the previous version. I used to be able to mouse-over image attachments and get a yellow balloon popup with the image file size and number of downloads. That information is missing from the new pages.
I just went to Ted Stryk's Pioneer 11 Saturn post:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2581&view=findpost&p=99744
...and discovered if I try to click on the link to his posted image:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=11865
...all I get is an error message:
"Sorry, but you do not have permission to use this feature...."
I wasn't logged in. I needed to log in to actually see his picture. Looking around (like the new Iapetus pictures), it seems that no uploaded pictures are visible unless you are logged in. Is this a bug or a new "feature?"
(I would disagree with it being a feature. It discourages casual browsers, and my cut down your audience for outreach.)
Email's are currently broken (got to work that one out yet ) so subscriptions will probably not get notifications, and sending emails to members from their profiles will probably not work either. That'll have to wait till tonight.
Doug
Insert worlds largest shrug icon here >
I see it with Firefox, Safari and Camino.
Doug
Email issue seemingly resolved (just sent myself an email from my profile - and subscriptions etc should work the same way)
Doug
To be fair, I don't remember either seeing that info before the upgrade.
Just for comparison - this is how I see the forum through Safari and Camino.
Yup. Now I'm seeing this same "new look".
It's nice to have the attachment's filesize somewhere, specially for those (like me at home) with dial-up connections.
Working just fine once name & password entered and ...this looks like an upgrade.
I tried it with IE7 on my work rig - no problem there at that time either - but because I was posting from my Mac, I couldn't drag a screenie over.
I think there was some sort of cached thing going on - because the admin section was looking rather broken - but at the same time Tesh said 'oo - works now' - the admin section started looking normal as well
(Although I do use one local cinema instead of another because one chains website doesn't work in anything other than IE )
And while I've tried to make this as easy a change as possible by keeping the legacy 2.1 theme - I'll be switching to the 2.3 theme ( with a new logo) to tie in with the Sputnik anniv
Doug
If we're talking about the hover box ( the title element that is contained in the link tag <A href="blah" title="safari.gif - Size: 25.72K, Downloads: 20" > ) then running under XP and on the UMSF I never saw it with Firefox (any version) or Safari but I did see it with IE6 (definitely) and IE7 (I think).
Since the upgrade I still don't see it with Firefox and Safari and definitely don't see it with IE7 now, so maybe my meory of it working with IE7 is faulty. The title element is still present in the page source so this should work.
It's not a biggie for me though.
Works great here on IE6/Win2000. I see only one issue on the new version: the lack of alt-text on the emoticons when replying (they had alt-text previously) - now I have to right-click "show picture" on each one to find the one I want.
I'm only noticing one difference in how the new software runs vs. the old software. It seems to take from three to ten times longer for a post to upload and appear now than it did before the upgrade.
I've noticed this from the moment I first made a post this morning, and it still holds true. Even a short post takes 20 to 30 seconds to upload, and a longer post (say seven or eight paragraphs) can take up to two minutes.
Every other operation seems to be very quick and smooth, or else I'd chalk it up to bad connections between here and the servers on the other side of the pond (as happens often enough). But since the rest of the forum operations are as fast as I've ever seen them, I just can't buy that explanation anymore.
It's definitely taking a significantly longer time for posts to actually post. It doesn't bother me overmuch, but it's the one big thing I've noticed in terms of performance.
-the other Doug
Odd- because the one thing the in the version tracker banged on about was the improved performance.
Doug
I noticed the slow upload last night but thought it was just me. Testing again with a low latency\high bandwidth link.
Edited: No delays in posting from here at the moment. I'll test it again this evening from home and see if it was just a transient issue.
It's probably a bit slower - but 2-3 minutes? That's too long. I'll do some searching.
Doug
Old bug, new bug
Old: When I brouse, I click on "view new posts", then hit the too-damn-small-active-area red boxes by the thread title. The software updates the boxes erratically on it's own, but it I hit "view new posts" again, it corrects all of the ones I've looked at to the has-been-viewed status.
If I leave the board and come back 10 min or 50 min <or something> later, ALL the boxes are red again and it shows the same threads, whether I've viewed them or not. If I click on a re-reddened box of a thread, it DOES go to the last thing I looked at or the end of the thread, but it's not passing that information correctly "up to higher levels"
New bug: I was a "guest" again and had to log in tonight, even though I have "remember my password" checked in the login box, and it's worked the last few nights.
Well -view new posts has never been a reliable way of checking up. It's useful, but keeps non-new stuff onboard for some time. I think it's possibly a symptom of tabbed browsers.
Retained login issue- are you going to www.umsf not just umsf each time? That cured it for most people last time around.
I'm not a code-monkey, I really am just a user of Invision, and as such much of the criticism about it, there's nothing I can do.
I Just had to log in again this morning as well. Using the same www.unman... as I always have.
I've never had much of a problem with 'view new posts': open them all in new tabs then click 'mark all posts as read and return to index'.
James
EDIT: No delay in getting this post posted - very quick.
Good good
And what about skinning the forum. The default IPB skin have not a good looking for me... I.eg. before subsection of forums, is it possible to have the UMSF spacecraft or thing like this? More generaly, a skin with more links to spaceflight without humans .
Posting is now back to the normal speed. Must have been a first-day glitch, maybe something to do with how Invision was updating the databases. But it's smoothed out now.
As for changing the default skin, can we have a chance to at least take a look at the choices, like last time? I've gotten used to this skin, and wouldn't care for anything that's more garish.
-the other Doug
The new skin will be the default, with this old one as an option if people choose it - I'll do sneak-peak's closer to the time
Doug
OK, cool. I like the option of choosing, is all.
As for posting times, I'm beginning to wonder if it might not be a forum-specific thing. It just took 50 seconds for a post to the Icy Moons forum (the poll topic, Iapetus black-on-white or white-on-black) to post, and then adding my vote in that poll took 40 seconds. But posting on this forum takes a second or two only.
Perhaps there is some board-specific setting that is checking for virii and such on some boards, but not on others?
-the other Doug
I'll just comment that the upgrade has fixed what has been the most annoying thing about visiting UMSF for me: Stupid IE couldn't remember my password when I came in to the site at "www.unmannedspaceflight.com," only when I went to the login screen. Now IE remembers my password.
As far as I'm concerned, the upgrade is a success.
(Though I have also been noticing the slow-posting problem some others have mentioned; I haven't seen a pattern to it yet, I'll post again if I do.)
--Emily
ch*nked. (*="u")
Still crashes. Must be a feature .....
-Mike
I had to log in 7 times to get to this point of sending a mesage. I get dropped out of my sign in each time I change pages. I sign in to http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com.
It remembers my login with Firefox, Safari and Camino on my Mac, and with Firefox and IE7 on my work PC - old version and new version both the same. I don't really know what to say. I've got people saying 'great - it remembers my login at last' and people saying 'it drops me every 5 seconds'. All i can suggest is things like flushing cookies etc Floyd. It's hard for me to see what I can do here when I can not for the life of me reproduce what you're describing. I really can't see how it's a forum problem rather than a local problem. Do you visit any other Invision boards? Do they retain login? Help me help you.
And Juramike - 'Still crashes' - doesn't actually help me fix anything. Some details might be nice.
Doug
As I recall one of the problems I had in the past with retaining log-ins had to do with using http://unmannedspaceflight.com vs. http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com
Some of you may try that. Look at your caches and check name of the cookie being saved, or indeed if it's saving one at all.
Floyd you may want to check your security settings on your browser, and as well as your anti-virus software. It is possible that there is some line of code in the new UMSF cookie that seems offensive to some protection systems. If you don't want to lower the security level, I believe it's possible on most browsers and anti-virus programs to isolate a web site and give just that url a lower security setting.
As Doug noted I'm not having any troubles at all with http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/landing/better/?utm_content=0705features&utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=0507lndgpgtest&gclid=CNmLqJeszY4CFRoRYQodDxK2iw and Norton.
Not found any settings for the attachment stuff - probably just one of those things they changed.
Doug
IE SOLUTION:
I found that IE was having the same troubles for me that Floyd described above.
Here is the solution.
Go to TOOLS -> INTERNET OPTIONS -> SECURITY
select TRUSTED SITES then select the SITES box then PASTE http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/ into the box labeled Add this web site to the zone
Be sure to uncheck the box labeled Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone
CLOSE
then be sure to hit APPLY
That fixed it for me. I was using IE 7.0 (temporarily )
Thanks EGD, that fixed it. Great instructions. It was an IE6 problem not trusting USMF.
THE solution
Ahem...
Yes, I know what door to take...
Regarding attachments, I'm glad I wasn't imagining things earlier. It turns out the attachment icons and popup information (filename, size and No. downloads) are the same old ones as before when I browse the forum using Firefox 1.5 here at work. At home with Firefox 2.something it's the "new and improved" design. It could be something in the way the board software handles different browsers or javascripts and such. Makes me wish I can cheat the board into thinking it's 1.5 all the time.
The popup text appears to definitely be embedded in page source, not something the browser figures out.
Another issue with FF 1.5 is the "Quick edit" feature doesn't seem to work, it does nothing when you click "Complete edit", but that's no biggie either.
The new and improved design is selectable for all if you so wish - but it's not customized for UMSF yet There's a drop down in the bottom left. Try it if you like - the new is IPB Board Pro - it'll be the default in October - maybe it'll fix some of the problems people are having with functionality.
Doug
I'm using IE 6.0.28..... under Win98se
I'm connecting to http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/
Had no problem with it recognizing me tonight.. it's INTERMITTANT that I end up logged in as guest.
As for the new default -- I don't mind the colors (well, OK, the grays) or the formatting. But I really dislike the font it uses to display posts, etc. I vastly prefer the current display font. Is that something you can change or control from your end, Doug?
-the other Doug
I agree. I like the current font better. Is it Verdana vs Arial?
I like the new font - but I'm in a big minority (none of the admins like it either )
I'll see what I can do by x-ref'ing the CSS's of the two and get the old font on the new theme.
Doug
We'll have IP Board Pro Doug&Dan and then IP Board Pro Everyone Else
Doug
So I was able to upload an attachment no problem using Firefox on another machine. It seems the problem (inability to upload) is just with Mozilla.
Doug,
can you explain how to add attachments to a post.
I can't even find the upload button as is mentioned
before.
I use Firefox 2.0.0.7
jvandriel
Scroll down to the attachment editor pane of the post page.
Find the browse button - click it- navigate to your file - click open.
Doug,
thanks for your quick reply.
But, when I scroll down in the Editor page
there is No Attachments Editor.
( I have switched off the popp-up blocker )
jvandriel
I don't know what to suggest other than what I've already said. Can you find other Invision 2.3 boards that have the same problem (or no problem at all) ?. Is there something unique to your config that a google-search finds? You can see that using the exact same version of Firefox, I'm getting fine results (I upgraded from 2.0.0.5 to .07 just to be sure we were on the same page)
Woahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-hang on a minute
This is the News section - where only admins and mods can start threads or do attachments. Do you have problems in other sub-forums? I've flicked the switch on member attachments in this sub-forum as a double-check.
Doug
Doug,
thanks again.
I have 2 computers, 1 running under Vista and the other one running under XP.
The attachment editor in the Vista computer suddenly appeared ( I did check it before
I send you the first E-mail)
but on the XP computer I still do not get the attachment editor.
For now I can live with it and, as you can see, I have already used it to edit
my last post with the Spirit pano from Sol 1315.
Thanks again for your help.
jvandriel
You should see if the problem occurs in different browsers - starting with both IE and Firefox on the same machine.
Check all of your security settings and make sure http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com is one of the trusted sites for everything (http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=4594&view=findpost&p=99971)
Note that pop-up blockers are often in place in BOTH your browser and your security routine like McAfee or Norton, so make sure BOTH are off if that's what you are testing for.
Whereas Verdana has always been my font of choice, and I have truly enjoyed having it here. To me, Arial is ugly and hard to read.
-the other Doug
Clicking on a thumbnail picture now opens the picture IN A FULL SCREEN sized browser window, bypassing my set default browser window size. Not to full screen, but to a full sized window. This is not the way to last board version behaved. If I want things open to full screen, I'll do it myself.
Anyone else find this as annoying as I do?
Can't say I even noticed the difference - I usually open attachments in their own tabs anyway - and there's not a thing I can do about it even if I hated it There are things I can change - there are things I can't. That's in the can't category. If I had a PHP/SQL guru on the admin team ( and this isn't the first time I've asked for help in that regard) perhaps we could work something out.
Doug, looking back that sounds more harsh than it was meant. Particularly since I mostly lurk and am enriched by other's postings without really contributing anything myself.
I also usually open these pictures in a new tab (SeaMonkey) and that still works fine. But I thought I recalled them also opening in the default size even when opened in a new window.
Doug, don't know if the question was asked before, but on which hardware does the UMSF forum run?
Shared hosting at Imhosted.com -
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Kernel version 2.6.17.7-grsec
Machine Type i686
Apache version 1.3.37 (Unix)
PERL version 5.8.7
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