Dungeon Master Forum

Hi all

Just to let you know that I will be doing some maintenance work on the forums this weekend. I do not know how long it will take. If the forums are unavailable, please try again in a few hours.

Admins: You can still login during this process but I recommend you don't! Things might be broken temporarily.

Okay thanks for the heads up - I won't go "Nooooo!" if I find I can't get in .

I will!!!

I have to briefly go out and I suppose should do things, but you can always text me if you need help with anything today (out on a walk most of tomorrow until late afternoon though)

I'm currently loading an old copy of the database on my home computer to test out the process. I forgot that this bit takes hours! So I might not be able to do the full job this weekend, we'll see....

Hi all

Everything went pretty smoothly, although I did spend over 12 hours on this today. My eyes are very sore.... At one point I thought I'd lost the entire database but luckily I panicked before actually testing things fully. It was a real "Phew!" moment! You shouldda been here....

So, here's what's changed:

1) Guest posting has been disabled - if anyone has a problem registering, they will need to email an admin -- I've updated that post accordingly. Beo, please add your email address too in the obscured format shown.

2) A new Textual Confirmation has been added to the user registration process. Questions and answers can be added in the Admin section, at the moment there are only three very simple questions. Feel free to suggest some! Visual Confirmation CAPTCHA has been disabled. When a registration fails, the main board Admin will get an email and an email is also sent to a central database to be added to a list of known spammers if it's valid spam. So I've changed the board email address from Cows to me as I'm probably much better positioned to deal with this.

3) Spoiler tags have finally been added! Simply wrap your text with [ spoiler ][/ spoiler ] (without spaces) to have it hidden in a blue bar. When displayed, rolling your mouse cursor over the text with show it. For some reason the Spoiler button doesn't appear in the Quick Reply box, but you can still write the tags manually in there and they will work. Note that they are a lot prettier in Firefox/Safari/Opera than IE. Example:

Spoiler

This is a funky new spoiler! Hope you like it!

4) A fix for Firefox has been applied to stop problems in the Admin section with it replacing a different user's password with your own stored password.

5) EasyMod has been installed which should make it easier and quicker in future to add new MODS.

6) Admin User List: One for the Admins, this allows you to easily set ban/unban/activate/delete users from one central screen.

7) Although multiple skins are no longer available, I have cleaned up the subSilver default so that it's a bit crisper and the text is larger. I also added back in some of my other customisations, such as the Quicklinks and minor formatting tweaks. I'll probably make the skin much more "DM like" in future but that can wait.

That's it! Hopefully the new security will stop spammers -- the main reason for the upgrade.

Thank you very much for your many hours of hard work!

Even just logged into the admin now (goodness knows what was happening there) and it all seemed cool. Theuser list will defintiely help, need to look at it more to see the limits of it!

Anyway, get some sleep - it's almost 3.30am!

And thanks very muchly again. Here's hoping no more nasty spammer posts!

Oh, I forgot to say, FlashChat is now broken -- it doesn't seem to work with this version of phpBB. Might have to buy a new version, or try some other solution. There are some cool AJAX chat tools out there now, might be a more reliable option.

thank you for all your work!

And I've just had to delete a spammer from the news forum already, who posted pictures

Is the question thingie actually enabled yet? I guess I will have to go check

thanks for the upgrade! looks a bit weird to see it like this.. but c'est la vie I suppose

Hmm, just checked, the textual question was asked and no answer gets denied...

thanks for all your efforts Gambit, and I believe it's in
the name of the whole forum!

OK, any problems with new functionality should go in another thread. Bound to be some teething problems to start, I haven't tested everything yet...

great job Gambit!

Thanks man. The crown jewels are safer now.

Thanks for your time!
While not very DM, I find the subsilver theme is quite nice in fact.

I've cleaned it up a lot. This is a default subSilver install:

http://www.styleswarehouse.com/phpbb2_d ... ilver.html

Indeed your changes make it nicer. The default subSilver looks more dated, less polished, while still nice enough for me.

Would it be possible to choose between default subsilver and your modified version?

Call me crazy but I actually prefer the default.
(This one is fine, too, though. I'm not picky about how a forum looks as long as it's got all the buttons.)

Sorry, nope, I ended up modding the default install and because all the mods and patches are now bound in to the template, I'd have to do the work twice which is what I'm trying to avoid.

As noted, effort on new skins is wasted if we will upgrade to v3 anyway. These upgrades were for security purposes and to get some better control over the mess the forums had become (in the backend). I still intend to upgrade to v3 once it's a bit more road-tested by the wider phpBB community.

Hehe, I've been using phpBB3 on a different board for about 6 months now. The level of use is quite a bit lower than here, but it seems to work nicely. The administrator controls are a little wonky (it took me way too long to figure out how to allow myself to make sticky posts) but I like the security and stuff-- haven't had a single spammer!

Of course when you're supposed to see letters in something that looks like Salvador Dali vomited all over a bunch of legos, I guess the spambots don't have a chance.

ahhh ! this is SO white !
anyway, nice job Gambit !
(can you add a "Chat" button above and remove the "who's in flashchat" sticky ?)

Thank you for your efforts Gambit, although I miss the old skin. And also:

Spoiler

Yay! Spoiler tags!!

linflas wrote:(can you add a "Chat" button above and remove the "who's in flashchat" sticky ?)

Yeah, will add it in once we've had a good test of it. There is some code available to show users in the chat -- but it's for phpBB3. Dunno if it can adpated for v2, I'll check it out sometime...

Thread demoted as it's no longer news.