The forum, its present and its future

GoldenEraGuitars

scrumhalf said:

lonestar said:

*sorry, just found this thread and I’ll be buggered if I’m reading 9 pages

Is that a request for a new feature?

Down boy

WiresDreamDisasters

WYNIR0 said:

I for one am HUGELY upset about this news. I honestly don't believe it  you have come to this decision. You've let us all down........You're not letting Richards Guitars back!?! 

This place is no fun anymore, he's the best plaything a forum ever had.

Glad you're back too!

PolarityMan

digitalscream said:

Roland said:

If we cooler them then everyone can ignore them

That hasn't exactly worked wonderfully so far The point is that we're no longer working within the limitations of Vanilla, so we might be able to put some better tools together.

Like, for example, putting a time limit on cooler visits so we don't have to remember when to bring people out.

How about let people spend frets to contribute towards someones ban......or just give Emp Fab an unrestricted ban hammer but every time he uses it it has an additioanl 5% chance of banning himself isntead of the target.

fastonebaz

WYNIR0 said:

I for one am HUGELY upset about this news. I honestly don't believe it  you have come to this decision. You've let us all down........You're not letting Richards Guitars back!?! 

This place is no fun anymore, he's the best plaything a forum ever had.

LOL we don't need that troll back!

Sporky

PolarityMan said:

How about let people spend frets to contribute towards someones ban......or just give Emp Fab an unrestricted ban hammer but every time he uses it it has an additioanl 5% chance of banning himself isntead of the target.

I like that. Let's extend it though - bring back facepalms, but every time you give one you get one too. Like being a bee. 

digitalscream

Just so you nay-sayers can get a good laugh in, I've hit my first problem. I've successfully migrated the important bits of the content database to the new data structure (takes approx. 55 seconds to do the whole lot!).

Now I'm stuck with the problem of passwords. Ideally, I don't want to make everyone reset their passwords. However, I also don't seem to be able to match the hashing algorithm for the password storage - Vanilla seems to use some weird PHP-only thing that seems like a bastardised version of Blowfish.

Ugh.

fastonebaz

@octatonic ;; I'd be in favour of a global password reset. 

Particularly if the new hash algorithm had more iterations and the website had stricter rules for password strength than the current site.

With an all new system its probably best to err on the side of caution and do a global reset to minimize exposure damage in the event of an early bug/leak/breach.

ThePrettyDamned

Wouldn't mind a password reset, surely it's as easy as sending a warning email out say, a few weeks ahead, then another a week before, then a day before (probably total overkill) - no one will be surprised by it that way.

Don't make life harder for yourself mate  

digitalscream

Well, I'm just looking at the possibility of adding a private localhost-only PHP service based on Vanilla's hashing algorithm which would check passwords against the hashes stored in the database and return true/false. The new forum can use that to check logins, and then use bcrypt to generate a new hash for use from that point on.

I'll spend an hour or so on it. If it doesn't work, then I haven't lost much.

Paul7926

Given all the work going on behind the scenes asking us to do a password reset doesn't seem that bad

digitalscream

Problem solved. A little bit of a refresher in how PHP does things, and I now have a web service capable of checking Vanilla hashes against passwords, which I can use to verify passwords and convert them on first login.

Almost exactly an hour, too

Nitefly

digitalscream said:

Problem solved. A little bit of a refresher in how PHP does things, and I now have a web service capable of checking Vanilla hashes against passwords, which I can use to verify passwords and convert them on first login.

Almost exactly an hour, too

It's almost like you're enjoying this! 

octatonic

fastonebaz said:

@octatonic ;; I'd be in favour of a global password reset. 

Er? Yes?
Good to hear.

digitalscream

If anyone wants to keep an eye on (or laugh at) the progress...

https://bitbucket.org/digitalscream/thefretboard.co.uk/

Pretty bare at the moment, most of the work has been hacking around with the data in Vanilla to get the public content working. Next step is importing PMs, and after that I'll work on roles and permissions.

By around Thursday, I should be in a position to get started on the actual views and controllers.

octatonic

Lee if I was you I would have announced the new forum software after you had already built it.
That way you could have said 'I am thinking of building a new forum from scratch', then everyone piles in and says it cannot be done.
Then a week later you present the finished article and BLOW EVERYONE'S TINY FUCKING MINDS with how incredible your coding ability is!
Missed opportunity there, fella.

digitalscream

octatonic said:

Lee if I was you I would have announced the new forum software after you had already built it.
That way you could have said 'I am thinking of building a new forum from scratch', then everyone piles in and says it cannot be done.
Then a week later you present the finished article and BLOW EVERYONE'S TINY FUCKING MINDS with how incredible your coding ability is!
Missed opportunity there, fella.

True enough, but...transparency.

Also, if things start going awry I may make the repository private to hide my anguish or poor hacks

Sporky

If you need any bits written in mediocre Visual Basic For Applications let me know and I'll look it up on Stack Overflow.

PolarityMan

Sporky said:

PolarityMan said:

How about let people spend frets to contribute towards someones ban......or just give Emp Fab an unrestricted ban hammer but every time he uses it it has an additioanl 5% chance of banning himself isntead of the target.

I like that. Let's extend it though - bring back facepalms, but every time you give one you get one too. Like being a bee. 

I liked the brief period of time where facepalms were taken away but you could still give them by hacking the http request with curl.

PolarityMan

digitalscream said:

If anyone wants to keep an eye on (or laugh at) the progress...

https://bitbucket.org/digitalscream/thefretboard.co.uk/

Pretty bare at the moment, most of the work has been hacking around with the data in Vanilla to get the public content working. Next step is importing PMs, and after that I'll work on roles and permissions.

By around Thursday, I should be in a position to get started on the actual views and controllers.

That brought back some unpleasant memories of the band website which is running on cake (an RoR inspired php port).
Im sure its great when you use it often but when you only look at the thing once every year or so then convention over configuration is a royal PITA.

Sporky

Yeah. That's totally how I got all of mine.