Oh well done ff, the banner is back again in all its glory!
Full Member
Oh well done ff, the banner is back again in all its glory!
Full Member
vBulletin is undoubtedly one of the best of its kind, isn't it?
Their upgrade process, though, leaves a very great deal to be desired. It block-overwrites almost everything that's already been changed on the server.
I took this up with them when we first started the old Forum; it has to do with their attempts to cater for the different ways in which different FTP clients handle 'Merge'. For some and in some situations it'll work perfectly, just leaving alone files on the server - essentially - that are newer than those which its upgrade bundle expects.
What I have learnt that I have to do is actually disregard their upgrade procedure each time this happens and simply rename the forum in its entirety (after making SQL backups etc) and upload their new files into the place of the old. I always worry that the MySQL database will one day object to that. Though it really ought not to: it's simply looking at a location in a directory structure for known files with all the right permissions, after all. But it does argue against rolling back afterwards ever, unfortunately: the forum is a 'partnership' between HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. Keeping them all working as a unified mass is key.
Before uploading the new batch (tens of thousands of small .php files), though, I have to bring down several hundred from the existing installation on the server and place them manually, painstakingly and double-checkingly into the right locations locally, amending and checking if necessary before (re)uploading the lot (all 24 MB of it). Then running the automated upgrade script itself. This is when any custom changes we've made should get put into the new system.
Before we opened this version of the Forum (after the BBC's closures late last year) we took advice from vBulletin on exactly which files we should save. You may remember we had lost all our custom smilies at that point.
It was a bit hit and miss even then… we were told that, since each installation was different, no-one could advise us on exactly which files to preserve manually over the upgrade.
Still, I had what up to now has proved to be a serviceable checklist based on asking three times "…Are you sure there's nothing else?…" that we had covered every conceivable touch of local colour.
I've just added to that list the custom banner, which the system really ought to detect as being specific to our system and preserve, and also replaced it from the former installation.
And put it back.
That will be caught next time.
The other 'innovations', Yes, I suspect we should put our concerns to vBulletin.
In the meantime, I'll do what I can with any other requests/anomalies and oddities you have/notice.
Suggest SHIFT-reloading pages to clear caches. And avoiding IE wherever possible: Safari and FireFox much more likely to perform well.
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Mark
Full Member
The banner is displaying in a wide selection of browsers. (Have just checked at browsershots.org)
Russ
Full Member
Oh, and another thing. Going to PMs it says I have 47 stored out of a total of 200 That seems far more sensible than the meagre 50 previously allowed
Well, at almost 7 o'clock in the evening, now, it's about time you were up!Originally Posted by french frank
Moi? Moi? I'm warm and cosy in bed.
(Hmmmm. Small yellow note now keeps appearing, bottom right, saying, Auto-Saved. Reassuring or annoying?
Small yellow note now keeps appearing, bottom right, saying, Auto-Saved. Reassuring or annoying?
Re the Auto-Saved, I'm getting this, too. I thought I must have pressed some obscure key combo by mistake. The first time it happened, I struggled to delete what I wanted to. Seems ok now, though, but I can't quite figure what's triggering this feature.
A mix of annoying and reassuring. Reassuring because, if the text is actually being saved as I go along, this is somewhat welcome because I occasionally delete what I've written by accident.
Having said that, I've no idea how to recover text from the Auto Save, so really I'm no better off.
At this stage, then, annoying only.
Full Member
Can we, on PMs, get rid of the auto-fill with quote I have tried to reply to a message and it's a complete car crash
Administrator
That's nothing to do with the upgrade. It's to do with me having so many PMs that I was finding I had to delete recent ones which I then needed so I increased the quota.
I don't care for the Auto-Fill quote either. I wonder if it can be switched off - I suspect not. But I don't have any difficulty deleting it.
Why don't you ... try writing ' Dear ff' underneath it, and then start deleting that and don't stop at the quote? It's only ordinary text so there's no reason why it won't delete by highlighting it (however you want to) and deleting.
hackneyvi - the yellow note appears automatically at regular intervals (every 30 secs?).
Ah!, I hadn't twigged that, ff. It hasn't appeared on my screen before today. And hasn't done it for a couplefew min ... Ooh!, it just did then and made a liar of me. The blighter!
Administrator
PM Auto-Quote: I've posed the question on the vB forum, it's had 22 views but no answer yet. This is definitely an upgrade change. It's a bit bothersome (I find) when people are sending very long PMs. Do people, generally, find it a nuisance?
The excessive red on the Profile Page should be correctable, because the vBulletin forum isn't behaving in the same way. I'll need to get tech support to help out with that which may take a while because they're probably very busy with upgrade queries. And I'll have to photobucket a few images to explain what I mean (unfortunately, the Profile Page isn't something the techies, as non-members, can see for themselves).
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