Soulriders 4.0: What, why, how, and all you want to know

[Dracos]

  So, we moved again.  Well, truthfully we moved recently to a different server too, but that was more subtle and clean and most people didn't notice it.  This time, I'm pretty sure everyone did and its our first time moving off of phpbb2 and onto a new platform.  For many, there's the obvious question of 'why'?  The old forums have been entirely functional for most users uses for years.  Its a fair question especially as this is the most drastic and jarring move we've done in years on the board.

  The primary instigator of the move, unfortunately, was spam.  The forum was getting hit, despite its 'protections' about 2-5 times a day and I couldn't really do much about it besides clean it up.  Our memberlist had swelled with a massive eight hundred spam accounts, ignoring the ones I used to delete before giving up against the endless swarm.  We did pretty good I think at keeping it from getting too messy over there, a lot of thanks go to Jon and Anastasia with helping there, but this was a war we weren't winning and something we needed a solution for.  Being clever people, of course, we knew of several solutions, all of which required what should have been trivial things to implement.  The next problem became implementing them to stop it.  Now, I'd like to thank Rezantis and Hal, they've both been a great help and had been handling the technical side of the site for years, but times change and both were quite busy, rightfully leaving it as my end to try and fix this up.

  Web coding, while I can do it, is not really my thing and looking over it to get started, I saw that there was a significantly long road  in front of me.  The forum had undergone a lot of changes over the years, surviving a bunch of rough spots and literally hundreds of separate modifications.  It had existed at some points as equal part testing ground and running space.  It was not a simple thing to walk up to and simply make what should be simple modifications.

  More so, it was old.  The PHPBB2 staff had been living in perpetual beta for 3 at this point for about two years.  We were already behind on the updates they'd let out before then and updating itself was a monstrous task that took an experienced person nearly an entire workday to do.  Despite it being pretty to those up front, the picture was pretty fragile and bleak behind the scenes as far as stability and security went, much less getting the type of protective changes I envisioned in.  Even if I did, I recognized I really didn't have the time to do those kinds of changes regularly and if I did, I really would rather be gaming with all of you during it.  Another solution was clearly preferred and I started looking at other forum solutions I was aware of as well as ways to transfer the data safely.

  During this time, Hal began setting up what is sure to be a pretty awesome touhou news site http://www.gensokyo.org/ to be a center of touhou fandom in the us.  Good luck there, by the by.  Doing this, he picked up a relatively young forum software project by the name of simple machine forums.  He pointed it out to me.  It looked neat and I started going through its feature list and such.  It interested me enough to give it a try and so I did.  Breezing over the testing and user experimentation that happened, it seemed to fit well.  Most importantly, it demonstrated having a pretty solid setup for enabling and disabling mods and themes to keep them from getting in the way of upgrades as well as an ability to do most relevant maintence right from the admin side.  I decided to take the dive, turning off the old forums and transferring over the database.  Took a few goes to get it cleanly over there and then a good dozen or so hours of work to beat it back into clean shape on this side, but overall I think it moved pretty cleanly.  We've since wiped out the spammers from our memberlist, repaired the boards, gotten everything mostly back how it was.  There is also a bunch of nice new features I'll go into in a bit.

  This is, unfortunately, not without some casualties.  One, for the moment, is the nice pictures that would accompany game forums.  Another is postbot, who was pretty requiring of the exact setup we had at the phpbb2 board.  The lovely themes are gone and our avatar gallery is pretty dry.  Beyond that, there's the discomfort produced by switching from a nice familiar setup that you all have been on for the better part of six years now onto something new with different quirks and other small issues that will inevitably crop up with learning the boards.  That said, it is fully my intent to see these things fixed.  The avatar gallery is still in existence and will get transferred over soon enough.  I'll be talking with hal and we may see postbot up again or if not, we'll get a replacement in.  Themes and other little enhancements will be filtering their way in, and we may get the old logos back up or let them get replaced with new ones =).  I'm looking for a way to get our nice little forum images up on this software as well.  For issues folks have, I'm keeping a testing forum up for the next couple months where we keep track of progress and bugs and try and fix them.  Please let us know what irritates you there.

As far as featureside goes, the ease of modding and theming is a big one for me and one I'm definitely looking forward to taking advantage of.  We shouldn't be hit by spammers anymore as we've got some pretty good antispam security and we're going to be improving it further.  There's a nice little calendar that most forumers now have access to edit.  High posters can edit their own custom titles.  Folks may have noticed their avatars look a bit shrunk, I adivse everyone to go refresh/reload your avatar in your profile and it should be fixed.  The slight cropping of everyones signatures should be easy for people to fix.  I also advise everyone to go to their profiles and double check that their birthdate information is still correct, turn on 'Return to topic after posting' and 'quick reply' for some nice features you'll appreciate, and you may want to go and add 'show popup on new message' and 'save sent to outbox' features on the mailing.  Unfortunately I couldn't default these settings for everyone.  There are also handy RSS features that come right out of the box for anyone who is interested and the forum is now accessible via phone.  I think that's pretty darn cool in and of itself.  Who's going to be the first person to harass us and go "This is from my iphone bitches"?

I hope to continue improving the experience here, getting it back where we had it and where it was too, but  I'd like to emphasize that this switch was a necessary one.  I hope people are patient with the issues that come up but if the forums were to continue, they weren't going to be able to in their past vein.

Thanks for staying with us,
Kind Fearless Leader