Welcome to Fractal Forums

i want to get an idea how urgent the update of the underlying system is

That really depends on what we get with an update;}

Really, I think an update should be done in the first place if and when the admin team thinks it would make its tasks easier and/or enhance the forum in its view. More bells and whistles/greater ease of use for me as a user: nice but not necessary.

What information is available about the pros and cons of upgrading?
What software are you considering (SMF 2.0?)
Will you be able to increase security of the site?

The forum moderators should have the most input into this question since they are more familiar with the underlying system.
Most casual forum users do not have enough information to make an educated vote on this issue.

The latest stable release is SMF 2.0.13.
This forum is powered by SMF 1.1.21.

It is probably a good idea to bring SMF up to date.

It's the moderation team that has been pushing for this for a long time!


The main issue is security.  This version has not had any updates for a long time and security flaws are bound to be there.  There is a reason they keep issuing new versions with updates very frequently.


Yes, unless a case can be made for some other forum software.


That is the primary reason this is needed!

I see no reason to wait until something bad happens to take measures.  That is a dangerous game. 

As I said in another thread, a lot of people have put a lot of energy and time into this site and it would really suck if anything bad happened to it!

It would be nice to have the forum switch to https for security and better search rankings.

I'm all for an update and, while you're at it, I'd appreciate other updates too. I know you want to keep it light on javascript and what not but, for instance, the current LaTeX plugin generates pretty sub-par looking pics, and post formatting with tags is somewhat painful compared to more modern places: If you can, I would love it if you could support Markdown and MathJax or something like that.

If the forum changes I find it important to keep the messages. We have a lot of very good information here. I imagine it's probably hard to migrate to different forum software without losing the messages. If so, I vote for keeping the same software, but an updated version.

Again - NOTHING will happen to this forum's content!!

Options are many.  Currently being considered is locking this site from registration and posting, after creating a new forum at fractalforums.com/forum or something similar.  Then migrating the member database over there so everyone keeps their usernames and passwords and post counts and all that, but the new forum will be empty despite all that.

Doing it that way is critical since we have literally hundreds of thousands of links all over the web to specific posts or other content in this forum!  Archiving it by locking registration and posting will keep all those links valid.  Then we simply change the top banner to link to the new forum with a short explanation so every page has a direct route to the new area and anybody can easily figure out what happened..

Likely, this wont happen in 1 weekend, and we may have to skip the whole maintenance mode thing until we do a bit more research and development.

But there are too many reasons to upgrade the software for the forum for us to just wait for it to fail before taking action.  

So that would mean that everything is still available but for ongoing discussions we'd have to open up new threads continuing the old ones?
I'm fine with that, although it would be even better of threads (at least all that saw activity in, say, the last month or so) could be brought over too. - If that's impossible I won't complain too much though. I think an update would be well worth the inconvenience.

I have not heard plans to do that. The idea sounds nice but it would take some work to find all active threads.

(The plugin Chillheimer requested would come in handy here. :D )

I'm 978% on the PRO update front.
Everything that Sockratease says.

Security is number one.
Still browsing with xp, no antivir, no firewall.


Besides: There are so many little things that will improve the usability experience.
Over the years you might have arranged with the inconvenient way things work here currently, with all those little flaws and annoying bugs and the cluttered structure.
But technology improves over time.
So does forum software.


Also: There is no need for a downtime. No need to rush things.
As we tried to explain to Christian repeatedly: We can setup the new, clean forum under a new url like fractalforums.com/v2 while leaving this place open and running.
Those users who are interested are invited to do betatesting. By trying things in a closed environment we can smoothen the experience, optimize everything and others can slowly import all user data.
You wouldn't even have to reregister. (though I'd suggest that strongly. As if we really had 5600 active members. Those who really still want to participate will have no problem with a 2 step-re-registration.
Also: If both boards are active parallel, we could transfer single, important threads from the old to the new. (at least that is possible with the forum I run, phpbb)

When everything runs really smoothly we go open, everyone can participate in the new forum and after 2-6 or x weeks the old forum will be switched to read only.
Nothing is lost. A smooth transition.

What speaks against such a plan?!
That is what I would like to know.
We've been pushing for this for months, no years..

Christian, asking 'the people' is a great thing and should be done.
But asking without providing information about what the update will actually change is pointless.
And much more important: I really wish you would listen to the remaining active moderator-team who's job it is to run daily business and who know about the technology and what a modern forum experience can be like.

We have so many good ideas and would love to just start working on them.
But we basically don't get the permission.
If we had simply used all the effort we had to put into convincing you of the necessity of a major upgrade, the upgrade had been finished months ago.
And you wouldn't even have had to do any work besides 2 clicks to setup a new database with the provider.


FORUM UPDATE NEEDED?

Yes. About 2 years ago.




ps: If anyone wants to see a feature update list, if we stick with smf, this is it:
http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Differences_between_SMF_2.0_and_SMF_1.1
http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Differences_between_SMF_2.1_and_SMF_2.0

my personal favourites:

• Tracking of new and old unread topics, not just from your last visit.

 !!!! this is a big one! so much is lost, because every visit here marks all new posts read and you will never see them again unless someone posts. so many threads have died because of this.

• A new WYSIWYG editor SCEditor
• Post Drafts
• Likes
• I won't list all those countless security fixes.
• for smf2 there are responsive themes. finally browsing on your phone/tablet without hurting your eyes!

.....

To be honest I could do without likes. Though I won't be bothered by them: I'll just likely not use them. (I don't tend to like, +1, thumbsup or what ever anywhere) - but all those other features sound neat!

Also, browsing without antivir or firewall? Granted, the new system ought to be much more secure, but that seems like you are just asking for trouble.

Oh and while we're at security, wasn't there the one thread once which mentioned that passwords used to be sent via mail? - That was fixed by altering the message, I think. But it implies that passwords are lying around in clear text somewhere on your server. This should never happen. - salt (add a long random but not necessarily secret sequence behind each password) and hash the passwords, verify passwords by verifying hashes! If you could conceivably send anybody their password you are doing it wrong.

And improved WYSIWYG is nice but imo Markdown would be even better. It can also work with WYSIWYG editors: They then would simply generate Markdown instead of various html or bbcode tags or what not.

as far as useability and interaction goes, I'm happy with it as is, updating the DB and server-side code to accommodate current security standards is a great idea but please leave "likes" to FB  :tongue1:

It's quite strange reading through new posts and seeing your own initials - kind of like dragging me up into the 21st Century  :D :embarrass:

So since this poll has ended up being rather conclusive, is there any kind of timeline you can share? Or is this still being discussed?

This will be happening.

As for a timeline...  Yes, I can definitely say with no fear of contradiction, that it will be  ...  Slow!

We already had one problem when the transfer of a database was done in a hurry and it overloaded the server.

There was resistance to the idea, and that's why this poll was made.  Just to see what the community thought.

But to us it was incredibly important to just get started, and do it methodically with no hurrying.  The database transfer is underway, but not too quickly since we really like our servers and overloading them makes them sad. 

Once it's set up, we'll probably do something crazy like ask for volunteers from the members to help out just using it and giving feedback to make it as good as it can be.

I can't put any specific time span for when that will happen, but I like to think it will be no more than a few months to get it done right.

as sock put it, the transfer will take longer than assumed by me, it is crucial but since this is not a single page website the transfer will take, it will be the least painful for users as possible which means accounts will come with, and a nice clean rework of how things are organized is planed to make it into the update

Some things to consider:

The server is running PHP5.2.17 which is from January 2011
There has been happening a lot of changes with this, by upgrading to newer stable version from the package manager (5.6, 5.7 maybe even 7.x) you can expect more than double the performance (except for time taken to execute the mysql queries).

When you are doing an upgrade I think it would be most reasonable to upgrade the full server stack and the OS: dist-upgrade / Apache / Mysql / PHP

Another performance boost can be connecting PHP to MySQL not over TCP/IP but over a socket.
But these are all changes which might break the running system.

I think page performance is the most interesting part of the upgrade:
- user needs to wait less (right now its 300-400ms for each page right now)
- leverages server load

Also the view for mobile devices could be better, hope a forum update addresses this.

Here is an analysis of the website:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=de&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fractalforums.com%2F&tab=desktop

Seems to be that images are not compressed properly here:
http://nocache-nocookies.digitalgott.com/gallery/*
these could be losslessly compressed by another 348 kb from 674kb (~50% of the whole frontpage!).

@sebastian leveraging server load would help a lot ;) the php version is in fact the most crucial thing that is making problems, like the wrong encoding of escaping special chars has obviously changed

i made a huge effort a few years ago to deliver images using a cdn and putting them on a different server, this is a tedious process, the front page loading is quite hacky because in fact i display html scaled full images for the gallery comments, it is indeed quite heavy, checking out modern templates will also go into that process

regarding general server calculation time, the new forum will start with blank content, so everything related to database queries will get a small boost, but a huge site with full fledged dynamic queries on front page will still be a huge problem, displaying user information, bot information, recent posts, recent gallerys and all that sum up to the very slow loading of frontpage, this is nothing i can adress without diving deep into the forums system, many many stuff and plugins is draining the performance

and at the end of the day everything is hosted on a 20Euro server so they do a pretty good job in hosting this site for 10 years now and this will continue as it was before, so, low budget hosting will continue, perhaps some kind of static front page could help but as i said it would introduce fine tuning which is not planned, the plan is to bring the forum on the current software base and make up for latest php and sql  and old security issues like sessionid transfered in url using non https servers is the foremost thing to achieve with the update

performance is not main priority, content delivery sytems that can easily wordwide performance is a thing that is relatively easy, for dynmic pages not so much but for the static content it is important

You're going to transfer all the accounts? At the very least I'd suggest giving all the ones who never posted a thing a generous time limit of, say, a year to log into the new page once, after which the account data would just get deleted and they'd have to open a new one if they want back. If their activity was so low it's likely no different to them than it would be with a transfer in the first place. Possibly that should actually apply to everybody. As is, stats like user numbers are rather useless. There are supposedly 5989 members and 4.69 registrations per day. And almost 50 thousand page views a day? (Can that statistic factor out crawler bots?)

Though more importantly, if possible, please restructure the forum topics while you are at it. Whenever I try to decide where to put a new topic, it's kind of a pain to even navigate all the available options, let alone decide where I should put them. And the same goes for even finding old topics: I'll usually remember, roughly, how a given topic was called, but based on that, if it didn't see activity within the last three days or so, it's incredibly hard to find again. At which point Search comes into play, except the forum's search functionality is as good as useless, barely finding any terms I'm 100% positive were either in the topic title or prominently features in the post.
In fact, these days, IF I try to find anything in this forum, I resort to on Google. There my desired result is usually within the top three, whereas the Forum's search will often claim there isn't even a single match.

My suggestion for a safe upgrade:
1. create a new folder for the next website: /var/www/next.fractalforums.com
2. create a new apache config for another domain: next.fractalforums.com and point to new created folder
3. download and unpack newest stable 2.x version of smf to the new folder and test if running
4. export and import old database to new system (hope smf has got a script todo that)
5. install plugins (hope none have vanished in new version)
6. check everything is running
7. point the general domain at /var/www/next.fractalforums.com
8. archive old system (web and database)

points 1 - 6 can be done and tested without interfering with the existing fractalforums.com (except for some generated server load)
if step 4 till 8 can happen quickly, thats fine, otherwise the fresh changes to the database have to be reimported to the new system.

In order to safe upgrade PHP and co, there is no way todo this on one machine (except for do and pray  :D )

Obligatory:

(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/2e/2e639765de8370ccc4b625c65b587c7267f92fd5a3c063bd049ce500974ce119.jpg)


Great to see the site getting upgraded! Hope it goes well, Christian :)

I think the forum search searches locally to the subforum you are in, so if you want to find everything from all subforums you better click Home first...

For one thing I'm pretty sure that can be set in the various advanced search settings. For another, I definitely saw poor search results even from Home.
Or to be more precise, I didn't use the search bar in the top right, I used the SEARCH tab.

lets hope the text indexing will get fixed in updated forum, still having problems getting it to run though and soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo few time