forums software upgrade

[eFestivals]

The forums software will be upgraded shortly, probably today.

The forums will be offline for a while - perhaps 30 minutes - when the upgrade is happening, and then when the forums are back online, some things (search is one) won't work as expected while the databases are re-indexed (which will perhaps take 24 hours).

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.

 

Major New Features / Enhancements

• Post Before Registering
• Animated GIFs
• AdminCP Notification Center
• New Email Features:
  • Email Statistics
  • Email Advertisements
  • Unfollow Without Logging In
• SEO Improvements:
  • Improved pagination with page number now in path (rather than query string) and unique page titles for paginated pages.
  • Improved use of canonical tags.
  • Improved handling of empty containers and profiles to reduce soft 404s.
  • Improved JSON-LD markup, adding @id tags and fixing URLs for comments.
  • Removed page output hidden by JavaScript.
• Performance Improvements:
  • Added Lazy Loading for images, which will speed up page rendering.
  • Added HTTP/2 support with prefetch/preload.
  • Added support for Brotli compression.
  • Improved default profile photos to use inline SVGs rather than generated images, which will speed up page rendering.
  • Improved browser caching of pages served by the guest page cache, which will reduce the number of requests reaching the server.
  • Improved handing of session data for guests to reduce database reads for guests.
  • Optimized images to reduce file size for faster page rendering.
  • Other minor performance improvements to reduce database queries and fix unnecessary code execution.
• Commerce Store Filters allow customers to filter products by price, review, stock, or custom admin-defined filters.

Core

• Added setting to display user group formatting in more areas (see 6 New Micro Features).
• Added less intrusive browser notification prompt in Notifications menu (see 6 New Micro Features).
• Added ability to show sidebar blocks to only certain types of devices (see 6 New Micro Features).
• Added ability for club owners to reorder the navigation tabs (see 6 New Micro Features).
• Added ability for announcements to be linked to an URL or be a title only (see 6 New Micro Features), improved consistency in how announcements are shown in different areas.
• Improved UI for entering time intervals in AdminCP settings (see 6 New Micro Features).
• Added a new Icons & Logos section in the AdminCP which allows providing logos for use when sharing links from the community, adding the community as a home screen app on a mobile device (along with additional settings for a PWA manifest to control certain aspects the community’s behaviour when used in this way), and in Safari’s favourites menus and pinned tabs on macOS.
• Added a new UI for attachments, showing a box with some information about the file, rather than a plain line (see Turbo charging loading speeds).

Commerce

• Braintree Gateway including support for PayPal (with recurring payments), Venmo, and cards. Deprecates some PayPal features.
• Added ability to target bulk mails to members who have spent certain amounts.
• Added sidebar widgets for best sellers, latest products, product reviews and a featured product.

New Server Requirements: PHP 7.1.0 or higher required (7.3.x now supported). MySQL 5.5.3 or higher requires (5.6.2 recommended).

Removed Features

• Removed EmojiOne-style emojis due to licensing issues.
• Removed Gravatar support due to privacy concerns and performance issues.
• Removed password hashes when downloading a member list from the AdminCP. This is for security, to reduce the ease of obtaining sensitive data if the AdminCP is ever compromised.
• Removed the name of the content (e.g. topic) from the “Next Unread” link which could consume significant server resources on large communities.

 

[eFestivals]

the upgrade happened earlier today.

The indexes are currently rebuilding, so search results might not be complete. Other than that things should be working properly.

[stuartbert two hats]

A couple of issues you might like to know about:

Visiting my profile gives a bad gateway error

 

The "Go to topic listing" and "Next unread topic" links at the bottom of the page no longer show the Sub-forum/topic names.

 

Not sure if the second one is anything to do with the index rebuild?  I'd guess not.

Edited February 26, 2019 by stuartbert two hats

[stuartbert two hats]

Just noticed you do see the forum/topic name on hover.

[eFestivals]

5 minutes ago, stuartbert two hats said:

A couple of issues you might like to know about:

Visiting my profile gives a bad gateway error

The "Go to topic listing" and "Next unread topic" links at the bottom of the page no longer show the Sub-forum/topic names.

Not sure if the second one is anything to do with the index rebuild?  I'd guess not.

Thanks. I don't think they're to do with the index rebuild.

It's a major upgrade and I know there's some big template changes, so I'm guessing that's the cause of some of those problems.  So when I get a bit of time I'll have to re-create the templates from new. Hopefully I'll be able to do that before the end of the day.

But after testing that doesn't seem to be the issue with viewing a profile, so I'll look into things a bit more right now.

[stuartbert two hats]

Cheers.  Looking more closely, the hover for next topic doesn't actually seem to contain the topic name, although you do see the forum name when hovering over the left hand link.

No rush 

 

[eFestivals]

I've just raised a ticket with the forum software peeps about the profiles not displaying.

I'll wait to see where that goes before I touch the templates, as the profile issue isn't a template issue (so the others might not be either).

[stuartbert two hats]

2 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

I've just raised a ticket with the forum software peeps about the profiles not displaying.

I'll wait to see where that goes before I touch the templates, as the profile issue isn't a template issue (so the others might not be either).

?

[eFestivals]

thinking about it, the profiles issue might be because of the re-indexing - because status updates is one of the things reindexing and the status displays on a user's profile page.

The re-indexing of status is about 25% done currently, so it'll be about another 12(ish) hours until its done.

[stuartbert two hats]

1 hour ago, eFestivals said:

thinking about it, the profiles issue might be because of the re-indexing - because status updates is one of the things reindexing and the status displays on a user's profile page.

The re-indexing of status is about 25% done currently, so it'll be about another 12(ish) hours until its done.

I've just realised I can get into my reputation by clicking on the number of votes at https://www.efestivals.co.uk/forums/profile/70690-stuartbert-two-hats/reputation/

And then if I click on the View Profile button... it works! ?

[eFestivals]

Hmm! Odd behaviour.

[stuartbert two hats]

11 minutes ago, eFestivals said:

Hmm! Odd behaviour.

I'm guessing it's something to do with the csrf key that's appended on the AJAX call?

https://www.efestivals.co.uk/forums/profile/70690-stuartbert-two-hats/?csrfKey=65d5f2495b4af3a5dde0001332bd6bdb

At first I thought that was a red herring, because visiting that link on it's own still gives us the 502, but wouldn't I actually expect that with an antiforgery token used out of context?  Not that I've ever come across as CSRF key used for a GET before.  I thought they only made sense with modifying data.

I'm glad this isn't my problem to track down, it's a headscratcher. 

[eFestivals]

You could be right. I've just discovered that profile pages won't display if you're logged in, but they display OK if you're not.

Looks like a bug in the code, although it's not doing that with my egigs install - but the efests install has more components to it.

[eFestivals]

Not a bug in the code, I needed to tweak some of the server buffers and now the profile pages are loading OK.

I'll take a look at those other problems now.

[eFestivals]

6 hours ago, stuartbert two hats said:

Cheers.  Looking more closely, the hover for next topic doesn't actually seem to contain the topic name, although you do see the forum name when hovering over the left hand link.

that's got to be how it's meant to be in this version, I think. That's not part of an altered template segment.

[Gnomicide]

I don't like the "next unread topic" on the mobile version rather than displaying what the topic is like it used to. When you click on it, you often haven't a clue what people are talking about unless you scroll up to see the thread title.

[HeyPorter]

Thread roulette. Keep on ending up in the ones I usually avoid. 

[e2p2]

17 hours ago, Gnomicide said:

I don't like the "next unread topic" on the mobile version rather than displaying what the topic is like it used to. When you click on it, you often haven't a clue what people are talking about unless you scroll up to see the thread title.

I couldn't agree more. Now I always go back to choose a topic because I can't determine if the the next one is interesting or not and which one is it anyway. 

[devilman]

On 2/27/2019 at 10:40 PM, Gnomicide said:

I don't like the "next unread topic" on the mobile version rather than displaying what the topic is like it used to. When you click on it, you often haven't a clue what people are talking about unless you scroll up to see the thread title.

Please fix this! It still works on other forums using the same forum although they may not be at the same update standard.