Site update news ...

[maw1124]

@gerryvz , I’m having trouble getting back to the default look on my iPad. Is that look no longer available, or is this an iPad thing?

maw

 

[nocfn]

MAW, I have had two IOS updates, and find that the forum still works perfectly, under flat awesome skin, however since the updates when I click reply on my phone - it is always treated as a quote...which is different than before the updates to my Iphone.

 

[gerryvz]

I switched the "default" to the FlatAwesome style. You can switch yourself back by going to the bottom left of the screen, tapping on "FlatAwesome Light" and selecting "Use Default Style"

 

[maw1124]

Yeah that’s what I did. That “Use Default Style” button has zero effect. I’ll restart my device and see if that changes anything. I’ll also see what the phones and MacBook are doing. May be an IOS thing. I’ve seen in this world a lot doesn’t work plug and play with IOS — devops nightmare.

maw

EDIT: Got it! Reset the device, hit Flat Awesome Light, then chose “Default Style”, which reverted me back to the prior blueish theme. “Use Default Style” continues to have zero effect. Maybe one button too many, It seems like “Use Default Style” takes you to Flat Awesome Light, whereas “Default Style” takes you to the prior blueish theme.

 

[sheward]

I like the new style. Seems easier on the eyes, which need help these days.

drew

 

[maw1124]

the powder blue calms me, which I can always use, especially having been sheltered in place for too long...... Ritalin anyone?

maw

 

[gerryvz]

Yeah that’s what I did. That “Use Default Style” button has zero effect. I’ll restart my device and see if that changes anything. I’ll also see what the phones and MacBook are doing. May be an IOS thing. I’ve seen in this world a lot doesn’t work plug and play with IOS — devops nightmare.

maw

EDIT: Got it! Reset the device, hit Flat Awesome Light, then chose “Default Style”, which reverted me back to the prior blueish theme. “Use Default Style” continues to have zero effect. Maybe one button too many, It seems like “Use Default Style” takes you to Flat Awesome Light, whereas “Default Style” takes you to the prior blueish theme.

Sorry -- my bad -- let me just change it back so that the Defult Style is the standard XenForo default style. That will revert it to the way it was.

 

[gerryvz]

This morning, I went ahead and purchased an extension of the XenForo software license for another year. This includes the XenForo forum software itself, as well as the XenForo Media Gallery (the "Media" item in the menu bar above), and the XenForo Enhanced Search (the "Search" button at the right side of the menu bar above). The license extension for all of this came to $80.00 for the coming year.

The previous license extension was due to expire on April 24, 2020.

 

[gerryvz]

NOTE:
The forum is going to be down for a period between 20 and 60 minutes on SUNDAY, May 3, starting around 6:30-7:00 AM Eastern Time. The purpose for this site downtime is for a major Ubuntu operating system upgrade.

During this period, the site will be unavailable. You may or may not be able to access the site, but the forum itself will NOT be functional during this time.

I do not anticipate any complications, but given the major nature of this operating system transition, unforseen issues could indeed arise, requiring remedial action or a reversion back to the existing operating system. I have upgraded another site with an identical operation, so I am familiar with the process and steps required for a successful upgrade.

Thanks for your patience !

 

[gerryvz]

Just a reminder that the site will be down for approximately 30-60 minutes tomorrow morning, May 3, from around 6:30-7:30 AM EDT, for the operating system upgrade. I will be doing the following process:

1) Rebooting the server

2) Shutting down the forums

3) Making a backup of the forum database

4) Making a "snapshot" backup of the all forum files on the server

5) Comparing and downloading the new operating system files

6) Updating all of the operating system files with the new Ubuntu 20.04 version files

7) Rebooting the server to begin using the new files

8) Checking and troubleshooting any issues (none are expected)

Realistically, we are looking at 15-20 minutes of down-time, but I am padding the time in case there are any complications.

This will be the first major operating system version update since the forum migration in early 2019.

Cheers,
Gerry

 

[gerryvz]

I am expecting to make another try at updating the forum's operating system, this coming Monday, May 25, starting at approximately 6:00 AM EDT. I expect the forum will be down for approximately 1-2 hours for system backup, database migration, and then the operating system update.

If things go south again, and another system restore from backup is required, I would expect it will take another 5-6 hours to restore.

If something DOES happen, I will make updates available for everyone via the 126board.com site via a status web page that I will update on an ongoing basis.

More as we get closer to Monday.

 

[gerryvz]

I have disabled (and will eventually remove) the Chat and the Quick Message functions. It seems they did not get much use. Noble experiments, but ones that folks did not seem to appreciate. So they are going bye bye.

 

[gsxr]

As @gerryvz had mentioned in the past, there is a new capability that has been implemented in recent weeks... This is the new "Quick Message" function, which allows you to dash off a quick message to another member, without having to open a full XenForo "conversation."

Quick Messages are short messages that can be sent only between two users. They are saved for a full year if the recipient does not read them, and they are deleted after 7 days if they have been read by the recipient. Quick Messages do not allow attachments to be added to the message, unfortunately. Enjoy your Quick Messaging !!!

I thought I never received any Quick Messages. Just yesterday I noticed the green bar in the Conversations page, and found a dozen old messages from the past 6+ months. D'OH!

Better yet, once read, they instantly deleted (without notifying me) because they were over 7 days old. And after replying to a couple, every single one (mostly unread) is now gone, deleted, poof.

Is there any way the developer can add an "opt out" feature for quick messages via our profile settings?

Side note to anyone who sent me a message, and never got a reply - I wasn't ignoring you, I never saw the message! Please send a "conversation"... thanks!

 

[gsxr]

OOOPS, looks like Gerry was typing the same time I was.

Thank you sir!!

 

[gerryvz]

I will re-enable Quick Messages for the next 24 hours. If you have any messages in that system, now is the time to review them.

 

[gerryvz]

Couple of quick notes -- I did a XenForo software patch this afternoon, from version 2.1.9 to 2.1.10 Patch Level 2. This was primarily a security fix, and included some other bug fixes.

What I thought was going to be a 5-minute update (and almost was) turned into a 20-minute update, because of some file permissions issues that I needed to fix. Some of the XenForo files needed to have permissions level 664, and they only had a 644. So, I had a do a permissions change on a number of directories via an Ubuntu command: find -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

So the forum was down for 20 minutes while I uploaded 30+ MB of new/updated files, updated the permissions on some directories, and then installed the update.

Thanks for your patience.

Secondly, I have shut down the "Quick Message" function today, because of redundancy and limited use. I had though it would be of more use to folks than it ended up being, and I think people just want/need a single messaging system. "Conversations" will be that messaging system.

Lastly, I have already shut down the "Chat" functionality, and will be removing it from the site today.

Thanks,
Gerry

 

[gerryvz]

Folks:

I have added new version of the "skins" that the forum uses, which are compatible and designed for the latest version of the forum software.

You can switch between the skins at the bottom left of the main forum window, where you click on where it says "Default style" or "Style chooser". You will be presented with a menu with the three choices of skins that are available.


I encourage you to flip between the three versions and see which one you like -- the default skin gets sort of boring after a while, IMHO......

The three version of the skins:

Default XenForo skin:



500Eboard Light skin:



500Eboard Dark skin:

 

[gerryvz]

One small and modest tweak I am doing today, is to bump up the size of the "thumbnail" images displayed, from a minimal 150 pixels to 200 pixels. This is to make the thumbs just a bit easier to see. I am rebuilding the thumbnail image cache database, which consists of tens of thousands of thumbnail images, so it is going to take a little while for these larger thumbnail images to display (until the rebuild is done).

Also, one other small change: when you click on an image in a thread, and it goes into "light-box" mode to display the larger/expanded version of the image. When you cycle between images in the light-box using the arrows, the lightbox from now on will only display the images IN THAT SPECIFIC POST, not all of the images in all of the posts in the displayed page of the thread. This means that you won't be viewing images uploaded by other posters in the thread, unless you go to that person's post to view their images. This eliminates confusion when a lot of photos are displayed from different posters.

 

[gsxr]

Gerry, I forget if we've already discussed this... but is there a widget/bolt-on that can automatically compress oversize image attachments? Some folks have their cameras set to take high-res pics that result in ~6MB files. It would be nice if these could be auto-compressed to <1MB (without reducing pixel size substantially).

I manually edit my DLSR pics down to roughly 1500x1000 and with JPEG compression, the size is generally <500kb. There's no need for 6MB except for printing posters on Indigo presses.

 

[xfadmin]

Uploaded files are resized based on the maximum physical dimensions (pixels) set in the Administrative Control Panel.

If the resized image is below the maximum file size (KB) limit, then it will be allowed.

Currently, these settings are extremely generous:

• Maximum file size: 8.5 MB (this is mainly for PDF and video files of some size; images are not often this large)
• Maximum number of attachments per post: 100
• File types permitted: zip, txt, pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, jpe, gif, tif, mpg, mp4
• Maximum image dimensions: 5,000 x 5,000 pixels
• Thumbnail dimensions: 200 pixels
• Default image processor: ImageMagick & PECL extension

When uploading photos from a cellular phone, such as an iPhone, there is a setting in the browser that allows the uploader to choose the size (Actual, Large, Medium, Small) of the image that is uploaded. I always choose "Large" when uploading images from my phone, as they are generally around 1 MB in size. This provides a good compromize between physical size, and file size. An "Actual" iPhone camera image can be 2-4+ in file size, and this is unnecessary.

There are add-ons that allow the automatic compression of all stored and uploaded images. This saves storage space and bandwidth. For a forum of this type, and the fact that storage space is not very expensive, this is not really an issue at this point in time.

 

[gerryvz]

I manually edit my DLSR pics down to roughly 1500x1000 and with JPEG compression, the size is generally <500kb. There's no need for 6MB except for printing posters on Indigo presses.

The digital camera that I use in my shop for taking photos (you know, the one that I was searching for batteries) for my HOW-TO articles, has image size that is set to around 250-400K per image. This is fairly small, but of good enough size that the images show up well in the light-box.

I hope that others, when uploading images to the forum from their phones, do specify a smaller and not full-size image, as this is unnecessary.

 

[gsxr]

That's what I figured. It's not about storage space though, it's page load time for us farmland dwellers on dial-up modems. Up to ~1MB or so is still decently fast, but a 4-6MB, I click on an image and then go read another thread for a while as the poster slowly loads.

 

[RicardoD]

These thumbnail image and lightbox tweaks are fantastic. Thanks

 

[xfadmin]

@gsxr, that is on you. Most everyone has broadband speed Internet (cable, DSL or fiber-optic) nowadays, and even images of several megabytes should load very quickly.

The settings we have for the forum provide a compromise between large (enough) file size for attachments, and defaulting to thumbnails on the display to accommodate faster loading speeds, and plenty of reserve compute power to process and serve those images quickly.

There are well-known MB forums out there that force users to upload images of <200K in file size. You don't want to have this forum force those draconian measures on our members, do you?

 

[gsxr]

@gsxr, that is on you. Most everyone has broadband speed Internet (cable, DSL or fiber-optic) nowadays, and even images of several megabytes should load very quickly.

~5MB pics take 10-12 seconds each to load. On a post with a dozen of these, it's painful. Auto-compress on upload doesn't appear to have any downside.

Forcing tiny uploads is clearly not the solution. BTW, I think the forums in question have now significantly increased their allowed sizes - do you know any that still limit to ~200k? I don't.

 

[xfadmin]

BTW, I think the forums in question have now significantly increased their allowed sizes - do you know any that still limit to ~200k? I don't.

I believe PeachParts and PointedThree forums both have small upload sizes. PeachParts may be larger than it used to be, but it is still smaller than most forums.

 

[LWB250]

PeachParts still has a ridiculously low file size limitation last time I checked. But I view it as a "legacy" forum anyway, so I rarely ever look at it.

Dan

 

[gsxr]

Fruitbird (Peach/Shop/Pelican/whatever) appears to have a 0.7MB limit for PDF's.

Interestingly, they have an auto-compressor for images. Try to upload a 2MB JPEG and it compresses to 1500 max pixels in one dimension, and reduces file size to <150k. Neat-O for dinosaur vBooletin!

 

[gerryvz]

Just a quick note for folks -- the thumbnail database is approximately half-way through being rebuilt. I expect this will take place on and off through tomorrow morning, perhaps even until mid-day tomorrow. You may experience some errors with the search capability until then, because the thumbnail database rebuild is hogging a LOT of processor cycles as the thumbs are each individually re-sized on the server. Processor is at 100%+ of capacity.

Forum operation itself will not be affected, just the search capability. It isn't broken, but the hogged processor is not sparing cycles so that the search engine can reliably connect, so it is throwing server errors.

After this thumbnail rebuild process is over, I'll do a quick server reboot, and everything should be fine. When that reboot happens tomorrow, the forum will be off-line and unaccessible for around 90 seconds.

Fruitbird (Peach/Shop/Pelican/whatever) appears to have a 0.7MB limit for PDF's.

Interestingly, they have an auto-compressor for images. Try to upload a 2MB JPEG and it compresses to 1500 max pixels in one dimension, and reduces file size to <150k. Neat-O for dinosaur vBooletin!

To answer @gsxr's statement above, XenForo has a built-in image resizer, as well. However, we use the added-on ImageMagick extension (which is a server-side program, NOT a XenForo extension) and its PECL extension as @xfadmin posted above. It is extremely powerful and versatile, and performs well. It does resize and process every image uploaded to the forum as both an original-size image, and a thumbnail. It also does a lot more than that in terms of image handling. The vBulletin system uses a very limited image processing setup called "GD" -- which is also what we used on the old forum.

GD vs. ImageMagick

If @xfadmin decided to set physical image size limits small (say, to 1024 x 768 pixels), ImageMagick would automatically resize them down to that (and also create the corresponding thumbnail). However, the decision was made to provide large limits, not more restrictive limits that other forums have done, for the convenience of the members. To the best of my knowledge, the limits here are much better even than the old forum had.

 

[gsxr]

If @xfadmin decided to set physical image size limits...

@xfadmin already replied to me via PM... er, I mean Conversation Street. I recorded it below.

 

[gerryvz]

Just a quick note for folks -- the thumbnail database is approximately half-way through being rebuilt. I expect this will take place on and off through tomorrow morning, perhaps even until mid-day tomorrow. You may experience some errors with the search capability until then, because the thumbnail database rebuild is hogging a LOT of processor cycles as the thumbs are each individually re-sized on the server. Processor is at 100%+ of capacity.

Forum operation itself will not be affected, just the search capability. It isn't broken, but the hogged processor is not sparing cycles so that the search engine can reliably connect, so it is throwing server errors.

After this thumbnail rebuild process is over, I'll do a quick server reboot, and everything should be fine. When that reboot happens tomorrow, the forum will be off-line and unaccessible for around 90 seconds.

An update on the thumbnail rebuild process. We are now approximately two-thirds to 70% complete with the thumbnail rebuild process, which I restarted this morning around 6:30 AM EDT. If things go well, I expect we'll probably be complete well before mid-day.

Here are a few views of the processor utilisation, disk I/O, and overall load on the system. In reality, the server processor is running between 80 and 90%, so the first graph under-reports things by a bit. The third graph on overall system load shows that things are completely maxed out at the moment, while the thumbs are being rebuilt.

 

[gerryvz]

I still have about 20% of this thumbnail rebuild yet to go. I will try to get it done on Thursday morning, but at the latest everything will be done by Saturday morning.

 

[gerryvz]

The thumbnail rebuild process was completed as of around 7:45 AM EDT this morning. So this is done. Enjoy the slightly larger and easier to view image thumbnails.

I did a system reboot to re-set the search engine, and now all is good again.

 

[gerryvz]

From a technical perspective, the forum has really been running like clockwork over the past few weeks. No errors or any types of problems. It has been a joy to maintain things because we've literally had zero problems behind the scenes. This is going to allow me to turn my attention to completing the launch of the 126board.com site in the coming weeks.

 

[gerryvz]

One small addition:

To join our long-existing "CEL" smiley ( ) ..... I have added a new smiley to celebrate "ASR" ( ).

Happy Friday !!!

 

[JC220]

126board.com

 

[gerryvz]

Does this look like a yoink to you?



I thought not.

The 126board.com server has been up and running since May.

It's just not live yet with the forum software.

 

[JC220]

Does this look like a yoink to you?

View attachment 109819 View attachment 109820 View attachment 109821

I thought not.

The 126board.com server has been up and running since May.

It's just not live yet with the forum software.

Sorry to doubt. But look forward to the launch of 126Board!

 

[gerryvz]

I try to keep the 126board server up and running with reverse clutch springs and claw hammers.......

 

[xfadmin]

I want to officially announce that the maximum daily number of "Likes" (reactions) for long-term contributing members of this forum, has been changed to an "Unlimited" daily number.

@TerryA is encouraged to make a $1,000 donation on behalf of the collective members of the forum, to express thanks and appreciation.

Thank you,
500Eboard Management

 

[TerryA]

I want to officially announce that the maximum daily number of "Likes" (reactions) for long-term contributing members of this forum, has been changed to an "Unlimited" daily number.

@TerryA is encouraged to make a $1,000 donation on behalf of the collective members of the forum, to express thanks and appreciation.

Thank you,
500Eboard Management

Check’s in the Mail

 

[xfadmin]

No $1,000 "Likes Reinstatement" donation has been received from @TerryA. This jeopardizes the feature with a reversion back to "Limited Likes."

==========

In other news, the XenForo software has been updated, after SIX "beta" releases, into the "Release Candidate 1" stage. This is the final pre-release version of the software. It is likely that an "RC 2" version will be released in the next week or so, which would probably be the final "beta" stage before the production XenForo 2.2 software is released.

We will not make any plans to upgrade from XF 2.1 to 2.2 until we know that all plug-ins and user interface "skins" are 100% compatible with the new software. Some have already been updated, and some have not required updates. Still some others will require updates from their authors, and I'm sure they are working on this as I type this.

In any case, we will probably not be doing any updates to XF 2.2 until the Thanksgiving time frame, just to be on the safe side, unless it's confirmed that all of our software is compatible before that point.

==========

In the short term, XenForo also released version 2.1.11 today. This is a very minor bug-fix update to the software, to remedy a security problem. I plan to take the forum down around 2:00 PM Eastern Time for the installation/upgrade to this version. I will expect the forum to be unavailable for around 15-20 minutes for this update. You will probably see the typical "DO NOT WIG OUT OR GO POSTAL" screen during most of this upgrade period, until the forum comes back up online.

Thanks,
Management

 

[xfadmin]

XenForo issued version 2.2.1 this morning, which is the first "update" version of the software since releasing XF 2.2. This was primarily a bug-fix version that also remedied two potential security vulnerabilities.

Forum was unavailable for approximately 18 minutes while the update was being uploaded and then applied to the forum installation. Other than that, no issues.

 

[gsxr]

Gerry, is it possible to configure the text editing icons so you don't have to click the 3 dots every time to access size, strikethrough, underline, etc? It was like this prior to the XF upgrade.

 

[gerryvz]

Nope. It's not configurable. The text editor is from a third-party company called Froala, and is licensed by Xenforo for inclusion into their forum software. And we're at the mercy of Froala in terms of the text editor and how it acts.

 

[gsxr]

Nope. It's not configurable. The text editor is from a third-party company called Froala, and is licensed by Xenforo for inclusion into their forum software. And we're at the mercy of Froala in terms of the text editor and how it acts.

That is nuts. What idiot thought this was a good idea? Oh, right, Frodo.

 

[gerryvz]

I know. It's tough on one's fingers, with that extra click added in the process of doing WYSIWYG editing.

 

[nocfn]

what are you wearing, Jake from State Farm....

...... UH, Khaki's?

 

[gsxr]

Any idea what's up with this error? Link is valid:

http://www.w124performance.com/images/cars/94_E500/flying_low2.jpg

 

[gerryvz]

Never seen that error before. Probably a Windows 95 error on your PC.