Anime-Beta's recent downtime

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sensei
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Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by sensei »

Anime-Beta was offline for a little over a week recently. The reason was that the server on which it was housed underwent maintenance, without warning to Rekka Alexiel, our technical administrator and custodian of the physical site on which the forum is housed. The changes made in the server were incompatible with the version of the phpBB software used to power this site, and so a number of modifications were needed on both ends -- server and Beta -- to bring the forum back online. There are still some bugs in the system, which you will encounter as you navigate to forums: I am finding residual error messages and noticing that some old messages still do not appear inside their message boxes. Please bring these bugs to the attention of The Team or to any of the Administrators, as we are actively mopping up the last of the issues.

Our thanks go to Rekka Alexiel, who took a lot of time in a busy week to deal with this, and to Magician, the previous technical admin., who returned to handle some of the more tricky changes in the software specifications.
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Re: Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by AnimeDad »

Glad to see the board up again! I was seriously missing looking around to get ideas on new shows to watch and cels to buy :-) I'm sure you know this, but there are some issues with pull-downs like under the "Quick Links" where the pull-down appears anytime I click anything on the page. It goes away if I click on the "Quick Links" element, but then re-appears the second I click on something else (like working on this reply). I'm on Windows 7, Chrome version 63.0.3239.132 64bit.

Best of luck getting all the quirks out. Been there, done that, and it eats a lot of time.

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Re: Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by sensei »

Magician reports that he has updated the forum software. (Indeed, I do notice the screen looking subtly different...) That should resolve bugs like AnimeDad noticed. Still, if you notice any further nuisances or outright problems, please bring them to the attention of The Team or any of the Mod/Admin. staff.
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Re: Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by magician »

Yep. Beta is now running the most current release of the forum software. I'm still testing things like the
spoiler
tag to make sure they survived the upgrade. I'm also looking at what new anti-cialis bot prevention features have been made available since the last time I worked on Beta. Since I've temporarily come out of retirement, This might be a good time to see what people might like to see on the board. There used to be multiple themes available for customization. More could be added back. I'm poking around the web to see if Cloud can be resurrected. I've also removed the robots.txt file for the moment to see how intrusive the search engine web spiders are. Back in the day they kept taking Beta down as they crawled every post on every page every day to index the site. I'm hoping the newer versions of the forum software handle that a little better.

What else do folks want to see before I crawl back into my retirement hammock?
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sensei
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Re: Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by sensei »

magician wrote: Thu Feb 08, 2018 4:49 pmI'm also looking at what new anti-cialis bot prevention features have been made available since the last time I worked on Beta.
Thanks for all the help and updating, Magician. I do know that the lack of Beta's visibility online has been an issue, and that was a factor of disallowing bots. Thus searches for information on common issues like Vinegar Syndrome, framing cels, and other basic forms of maintenance turn up none of the valuable discussions on this forum. I'm trying to rectify this with the new forum on Things Anime Art Collectors Ought to Know, but, like everything that goes on here, that's done in time stolen from professional and domestic obligations.

Concerning the Hot Russian Babes spambots, we have lately been manually authorizing new registrations, checking their credentials against an online data base of complaints. (One potential Beta member had totalled 64K complaints on other sites.) JWR and I have gotten pretty good at smelling bad eggs and deleting them before they create a nuisance, and that doesn't take much time out of our weeks. But, yeah, if there's a new system that keeps them from attempting to register to begin with, then that would be a blessing to us all.
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Re: Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by Pixel »

Right now, I'm seeing most of the menus on the forum open when they should be closed. Quoting and attachments still have issues too.

I'm glad to see things getting back on an even keel though. Thank you all for getting things back on track. :)

As to feature requests, there is one I'd like to be considered if time allows-custom ranks for members with enough posts, or at least maybe the option not to display a rank/title under one's username.

Thank you for your consideration.

I'm still checking the board for troubles myself. I don't have enough of this kind of software experience to offer direct help, but I can try to keep up with issues when I see them. Most reports so far I've posted in sensei's thread on RS, just in case one of the bugs here prevents the report from being seen.
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Re: Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by sensei »

We are aware that the old "Rubberslug" banner is no longer visible.

Updating and debugging continue, so if something goes wrong, it might be that some part of the forum is temporarily offline for maintenance. The "Preview" function, noted as non-functional last night, is now working, for example. And the open menus and quoting issues now are fixed.

But there will no doubt be more bugs to spot. Everyone, please do continue to spot and report them as you notice them.
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Re: Anime-Beta's recent downtime

Post by magician »

Finally had some time to keep tweaking. I'm hoping the dropdown glitches and quoted text weirdness are fixed. I also got the logo restored.

I'm looking into the custom ranks request. I'm a couple years removed from coding PHP files so I'd prefer to install a published mod. I'll let you know what I find.

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