Major Forum Upgrade Incoming

[Jon]

In the next week or so the forum will be upgraded to IPB4. I'm currently testing features with the MVPs. The upgrade should take a couple of hours so the site will be offline for that time. When it comes back online there are still about 12 hours worth of background tasks that will begin.  

During these background tasks a lot of content will look incorrect or be completely broken:

• Search offline
• Emoticons
• Quotes / Trac links / Topic links - pretty much anything with BBCodes

AutoIt/Plaintext code should look correct straight away - I'm pre-converting it myself. However we will have to switch to Prettify for code highlighting and direct links from code into documentation will no longer work.

Do not re-edit your old posts during this time with the intention of cleaning them up. It will happen automatically and you are just wasting time.

I'll post status updates of the rebuild process and when it is complete.

The new site is a responsive design and therefore works much better on small devices. There is no "mobile" skin anymore. But obviously the look might not be to everyone's taste. I'm happy to tweak the template a little to fix minor cosmetic annoyances but I'm not going to go crazy with it as all the tweaks need to be redone on each upgrade.  If you want to have a taste then look the IPB main site at http://community.invisionpower.com/

[Jon]

A short users guide to the IPB v4 new forum - this will be reposted and pinned after the upgrade. This is just an advance warning

The forum operates in much the same way as the old v3 one, but there are several major differences - so here is a quick guide:

Firstly login:

This requires displayname/password - not username/password as before.

Next the editor:

This is now full WYSIWYG using HTML and seems a lot better than the v3 one. There are buttons to add hyperlinks, quotes, code and spoilers, plus Trac links . It is recommended NOT to use the basic editor as BB codes no longer work and so it is difficult to enter anything other than plain text.

Posting links to threads/posts is easy: Posting a thread/post URL (use the "share this post" button at top right to get a post URL) directly into the editor actually inserts a clickable single line box. Using the editor "link" button lets you choose clickable text to display in place of the box.

The "code" button gives a choice of "AutoIt" (with syntax highlighting) or plain "Text". Code over a certain length still appears in scrollable boxes, but these no longer have "expand/popup" buttons - just click on the code and it is all automatically selected.

Paragraph spacing is automatically applied when pressing {ENTER} - use {Shift-ENTER} for single lines.

Now the member details:

The dropdown under the member name at top right still accesses things such as Private Messages, Content, Followed Content. To change display name, signature, password, go to "Account Settings"

How members are notified of forum events has changed - check to find out how previous settings have been transferred because there are now some forced choices where the notification will be in-forum rather than by email.

The "Friend" functionality has been replaced by the ability to "Follow" other members - this is done via a button on their profile page.

[Jon]

10...9...8...