Dungeon Master Forum

This is for Christophe really:

The Forum Admin area states we should upgrade the software. What's involved in that these days? (I've not kept up with phpBB or how this forum is now setup).

Can we do a simple update, or is it something that requries planning/time to account for skins, mods, etc?

Hopefully this should be rather simple using the automatic updates. I'll make a backup and check about the mods that we have in place.
I'll try and perform this update during the next week-end, please expect a short downtime.

Thanks Christophe. There's no hurry though, I was just wondering what's involved.

I have upgraded the forum software to the latest version of phpbb available: 3.0.11
Sorry if anybody tried to connect during the short downtime (13 minutes).

Please tell if you notice any issue with this new version.

I have upgraded the phpbb forum software to version 3.0.14
Sorry if anybody tried to connect during the short downtime (around 20 minutes).

Please tell if you notice any issue with this new version.

Thanks Christophe. I saw that upgrade note in the Admin but was worried something might break, so I left it alone

Quick Notice:

I've applied some performance optimisations to the site and forum. You probably won't notice any difference, but these optimisations will help lower the bandwidth consumption of the site. We average around 10GB bandwidth usage per month (which is quite high for a site with such a small audience)... so I was keen to improve that.

What kind of optimisations? I ask to know if I may break something with any future forum version upgrades.

I compressed some of the images used in the ProScreamer theme, and added forced GZIP compression on HTML, JS and CSS files (in .htaccess). It reduces most page loads by around 100Kb, which adds up significantly

OK, nice job! No risk on future upgrades then.