16 replies to this topic

[velma]

ALRIGHT! So OpaQue decided to upgrade both the forums (Knowledge Sutra & Asta Host) to the latest version of IPB. Let's all thank OpaQue for the wonderful upgrade which looks real wow. Currently, he is still tweaking the forum settings removing every kink possible therefore I request members to please not post in other topics regarding errors

OpaQue is busy working hard on removing every error but since he is customizing both the forums, it can take a little longer. All your doubts, errors and so on can be posted here

[k_nitin_r]

Velma,

Thank you for posting the announcement. A little over an hour ago, I noticed the change and also found that I couldn't go to the sub-forums by clicking on them - I clicked on "Alerts and Notices" and the page loaded without the CSS and with Javascript errors. I looked up the thread mentioning that Knowledge Sutra was upgraded to version 3.0 as I could not find a suitable thread at the time and posted about the error to that thread.

BTW, did we skip version 3.1 of the Invision Power Board? I found a thread about an upgrade to version 3.0 and here we have a thread about the upgrade to version 3.2. Either we skipped a version, or the odd-numbered decimal of the version number of Invision Power Board indicates a development or a beta release, like they did for RedHat Linux before they branched off into the Fedora project.

Speaking of Asta Host, I haven't logged onto the forum in ages because I could not find the link on the ComputingHost website and I could not remember the name so finally now that you have posted a link to Asta Host, I was about to visit the forum. I am rather surprised to know that both forums are being managed by Opaque. I wonder why a single organization would want to maintain two competing forums. Perhaps if the target audience and the type of dicussions on the websites were different, it would make sense but I never really compared the two forums based on the content to determine what kind of audience they cater to. I did notice that Asta Host has more sub-forums related to technical issues and a couple of people on Knowledge Sutra discussed about Asta Host in the past and mentioned that it was more technical than Knowledge Sutra.

Oh, and when I looked at Asta Host, I discovered yet another bug - both Asta Host and Knowledge Sutra have the same logo, which is the IPS Community. I guess branding and theming weren't done on the new version yet. If either Knowledge Sutra or Asta Host is looking for volunteers, I would be happy to help out.

I sometimes wonder why Knowledge Sutra / Trap 17 was based on the Invision Power Board software rather that vBulletin, which was more popular at the time, or phpBB which is free (both open-source and available at no cost). I would imagine that Invision Power Board was cheaper than vBulletin or the organization used a copy of Invision Power Board internally and decided to use the software for the public forum as well, or somebody within the organization had experience of working with Invision Power Board (or maybe even Invision Free, which was the free version of Invision Power Board offered at the time but is no longer available) so they decided to cash in on his/her experience and use Invision Power Board to get started quicker.

If I were given the choice to select among free and open-source forums, I would choose bbPress simply because it is easier to install and manage plugins. I have looked at the source code within phpBB and plugins are basically just modifications made to the source code - there is even an automated installed that can look up specific lines within your source code and make modifications. I see that as difficult to manage because if you removed a line of code, some updated would not work, while on the other hand the plugins would run quicker because the overhead of managing a plugin framework at runtime would not exist. I did see WordPress run rather slow with a plugin framework so I would imagine that the case is the same with bbPress.

[mahesh2k]

What is the status of mycents ? How much time it'll take for it to come back ?I just hope mycents come back and this time they're not low valued for members contribution. I have not noticed any errors so far, so don't know what opaque is fixing out there. I just noticed that making replies is much slower than previous IPB board. Also finding new threads and replies is lot harder. We have to click on "View new content" to find the new threads and replies from there we can find some options. Anyway good to see things changing here. Only if mycents are reasonably rewarded, more members will come to post in forums.

[k_nitin_r]

Mahesh,

I did not get my MyCENTs credited for yesterday's posts so I am guessing that the MyCENTs script may be offline though I cannot tell for sure because at times the MyCENTs script can take as long as two days to credit the MyCENTs.

The upgraded forum is slower than it was before the upgrade but it does display a progress bar so the wait does not seem too long.

[k_nitin_r]

UPDATE: I just got the MyCENTs email. The script is running as expected. BTW, the "My Status" feature wasn't working earlier but is working perfectly right now.

[velma]

Firstly MyCent isn't down since OpaQue made sure the upgrade wouldn't break his script. As for the amount you get, why don't you post 5 replies in the forum? Make them slightly longish like the one in this thread.. Once you get the email confirming the mycent for the day, simply give me a copy so that I can send it to OpaQue for verification

Secondly, there is plenty pending since there are a few template errors that need fixing.. And as you know, every time the forum is upgraded, everything from logo to the modules (gallery, widgets, sidebar) need to be reconfigured. So bear with the "View new content" option for a little longer, It is the weekend here so I guess OpaQue would start tweaking first thing Monday morning.

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Speaking of Asta Host, I haven't logged onto the forum in ages because I could not find the link on the ComputingHost website and I could not remember the name so finally now that you have posted a link to Asta Host, I was about to visit the forum. I am rather surprised to know that both forums are being managed by Opaque. I wonder why a single organization would want to maintain two competing forums.

The link to the Asta Host forums is astahost.com/index.php and was originally started for the serious techies while Ks was started for youngsters interested in a general discussion board. If you are a techie, you should register there with the same email address as ks & xisto support billing I prefer two boards instead of one since it reduces the clutter of too many topics/sub forums.

Quote

Oh, and when I looked at Asta Host, I discovered yet another bug - both Asta Host and Knowledge Sutra have the same logo, which is the IPS Community. I guess branding and theming weren't done on the new version yet. If either Knowledge Sutra or Asta Host is looking for volunteers, I would be happy to help out.

The logos are there but like I mentioned earlier, it has to be reconfigured by Opa and I think he will do it with the designer in the morning I personally think he should put up the member logos on KS again like it was earlier. As for the choice of boards, I think it is too late to switch the platform considering how much content is present on this board alone... But IPB is a powerful and very cool software and maybe Opa can answer your question when he comes back to the forums

[mahesh2k]

I just noticed that change in mycents in my post. So thanks for that velma and shri. Another thing is that KS and AH breaks in stylesheet if the speed of internet is slow. Earlier forum wasn't like this. So i dont know what type of heavy update this time IPB made. I hope you pass message to opaque about not adding any extra library like dictionary.com widget or share widget, it'll make forum harder to access to us (Mobile users). I know we are in minirity but still. Anyway design of default theme looks clean and good compared to VB and all those free forum system but at the same time it is going slow too. I like IPB for various reasons, most of time i noticed that it is more accessible than VB and PhpBB.

Anyway, i hope you guys can find good theme for this IPB version (which is going to be painful, i know ). My content thingy should be gone from the navigation or else most of us are going to get stuck in the forum like rat in maze.

[Quatrux]

Nice work on the update, for me personally it's much easier to post now, the forums are much more dynamic and using the new features of web which is really cool. The thing which I still not used to that both forums are identical now, Astahost and Knowledgesutra, maybe something could be done about that? Like a different color scheme or something, or I can change it myself?

[velma]

Quote

Nice work on the update, for me personally it's much easier to post now, the forums are much more dynamic and using the new features of web which is really cool. The thing which I still not used to that both forums are identical now, Astahost and Knowledgesutra, maybe something could be done about that? Like a different color scheme or something, or I can change it myself?

Lol OpaQue just got started on it, give him some time, he should probably finish customizing soon.. The logos being the first step. I think the similar theme isn't all that big a priority since the main distinguishing factor about the two forums are the topics

[k_nitin_r]

Velma,

Asta Host sounds like a good place to hang out to pick up some mad techie skills but I guess it is more of a place for people who live with a particular technology day in and day out so I'll probably get started on Knowledge Sutra.

I'm not too particular about getting a new theme for the forum because I kinda like the default that is included with the forum.

Mahesh,

Remember when we had a toolbar at the bottom of the page consisting of games? The toolbar increased loading time quite a bit.

BTW, I used my phone, the Nokia E72, to access Knowledge Sutra and it didn't quite fit the screen width so I imagine you must be using an iPad or a tablet to access the forums.

I haven't compared vBulletin with Invision Power Board but I did have a look at phpBB and bbPress, both of which are free, and bbPress seemed to have a better plugin architecture than phpBB but I imagine phpBB would be quicker than bbPress because of the lack of a plugin architecture.

Quatrux,

If you are planning on changing something yourself, you should consider using a web monkey script. You can use web monkey to alter the markup of the page and perhaps add some CSS styling to the elements too.

[mahesh2k]

Okay as asta seems to be quite let me post here the bug updates due to no presence from opaque. Mycents on astahost are not working at all. I have tried with lenghty post approach from velma's suggestion. Two posts and more than two days and no update of mycents at all. I can definitely confirm this on my myncents stats over there. I hope notifying about bugs and broken things is okay ? or am i supposed to shut up ? Let me know either way because i don't want to end up in some drama.

Nitin, Yes i remember that. It was meebo or wibya toolbar if i remember correctly. But it was taken down by opaque and things started working. I don't have iPad but yeah i do use asta and some other forums on other android based tablet and smartphones. Old IPB used to work fine and new is taking more time due to heavy ajax. As for bbpress and phpbb, they're totally complicated forums and it takes newbies a lot of time to figure stuff out. Bbpress is not at all suitable for bigger forums. Phpbb is the most ugly in management and for extensions too. So if i got money then choice is between ipb and vb. In case of VB they're simplifying things compared to VB and are much bettter for handling larger forums.

[k_nitin_r]

Mahesh,

I have been posting on Knowledge Sutra as well as Asta Host and have not been receiving the MyCENT emails so I cannot tell which is sending me the MyCENTs but I do know that at least one of the two forums is crediting my account for the posts that I make. You can keep the rest of us posted about what has been happening to the MyCENTs for your postings. I have not been tracking my MyCENTs statistics and I rely entirely on the MyCENT emails and the balance displayed on the Xisto Support and Billing website to tell when my account has been credited. In the absence of MyCENT emails, I have no clue as to which posts were accounted for because I posted both to Knowledge Sutra and to Asta Host.

The toolbar isn't Meebo - Meebo is a web instant messaging application. I'll look up Wibya to see if I can find the toolbar, not that I have any intention of using it.

I have not hopped onto the Android bandwagon yet. It's still all Apple and Nokia-Symbian for me. Nokia has just about abandoned the Symbian platform in favor of Microsoft's Windows for Mobile. With Steve Jobs' passing, the future of Apple's platform seems uncertain. I don't really know which the right platform would be for a tablet or smartphone purchase, but Samsung seems to be pushing forward with the Galaxy and some pretty heavy marketing.

The new Invision Power Board forum does take longer when posting messages with the Ajax loading bar. It is supposed to run quicker because there is less data being passed back and forth. I imagine there must be CPU overhead because a WordPress based blog I created for a client that I ran was pretty slow because the server CPU was maxed out in handling all of the requests that the server would get, and it is not even a Reddit or Digg front page kind of site but rather simply a website with about half a dozen concurrent visitors.

[mahesh2k]

I am not much digging into this because i know that both the forums are silent and hardly anyone posting so any reason like mycent script runs slow etc. is not something i am going to believe as they're running it manually or not running at all. I can figure that it all coming down to manual post approval from mods and assigning mycents value to that. So that is why i'm only sticking with asking straight questions like "are mycents updated ?" and leaving it at that. I post when they're updated and don't post when they don't. Opaque said recently that he devalued the mycents in order to bring members back which turned me off so i'm not going to create any drama over here. Just going to post to see if they wish to give me mycent and post on that point else just skim and move on. I don't see points in asking questions like when mycents are going to update, why they're allocated less or why updates on this site are slow etc. I'm past all that.

Coming to meebo toolbar point I guess you're not aware of Meebo for website - http://www.meebo.com/websites/ Wibiya is yet another beast like that-both are annoying. Hope you learned something new today

Apple is too expensive and totally useless considering other phones with lots of featuers at lower costs. Nokia W7 is going to be great and windows will not be that bad. Do check akash tablet and reliance tablet if you're keeping tab on tablets

Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal based forum extensions are not good for large sites. For small groups they're okay but larger sites they not only eat CPU but often cause DB errors and are prone to same attacks like their parent core.

[k_nitin_r]

Hi Mahesh!

You do bring up a very good point - with so few posts to account for, the MyCENTs script should not take a really long time to run - I am guessing it runs once a day instead of for every post as it was back in the day. Perhaps the script should run more often now that we do not have as much activity on the forum. I believe the idea of crediting posts with fewer MyCENTs would drive people away rather than attract them back to the forum. Velma suggested that the MyCENTs credited for the posts have not been reduced, so I'll have to take her word for it. Perhaps the feeling that I have of getting fewer MyCENTs is because the script runs less frequently so I get the MyCENTs email less frequently, but I cannot tell for sure.

I did not know about Meebo's service for website so, yes, I did learn something today :-)

The Wibiya toolbar was pretty heavy because it had to load whenever the page refreshed and that slowed down the forum considerably when it was installed. They did have a bunch of online games and they tried to make it a script that did everything and they would have been successful if it was a part of the desktop wallpaper page (we can set web pages to be our desktop wallpapers too, but it runs only through Microsoft Internet Explorer; it was a central part of the anti-competitive practices lawsuit against Microsoft by Netscape when stating that Microsoft was creating a monopoly for its browser on its operating system).

There is a television commercial airing over and over again about the Reliance tablet and so I have heard about it. It is apparently cheaper than most other tablets being offered and it is powered by Android. I have heard of the Akash tablet once but I have not heard much about where it is sold and how much it is sold for. I'm not really into tablets but I do like ebook readers because of their long battery life, which is about two weeks.

I am not really a fan of forum extensions based on content management systems, especially if they woven into the upper abstraction of content management systems that are written in PHP because it becomes very processor intensive. A framework such as Code Igniter adds considerable processor overhead and can bring down a web server without even having to run a full-blown content management system. WordPress adds a lot more overhead so I imagine a forum based on WordPress (treating the first post in a thread as a WordPress post and replies to it as comments) would literally kill the web server with lots of requests waiting for processing and the request queue eventually preventing new requests to the web server. If a forum was based on a content management system written in Java or .NET, it would perhaps lead to less of a performance problem but I still would be concerned about stability. I had an ASP.NET application that did not do much except write logging messages to a file and it would cause the web server process to stop processing new requests with a high processor usage for no reason at all. There wasn't really a solution to the problem so all we could do was manually kill the web server process through another background process and eventually resorting to disabling logging messages entirely. I have not dealt with web-based Java applications in a production environment so I do not know if web masters have experienced similar platforms on a tried-and-tested Java platform as well. I have heard of high processor usage problems on newly released versions of Java enterprise application servers so I would imagine that most large organizations would run a version older than the latest out there hoping to get a stable platform for development. Speaking of older platforms, several banks have not yet moved to the Mircrosoft .NET 3.0 platform, let along the .NET 3.5 platform. Their reasoning is that the Mircrosoft .NET 2.0 platform is much too stable to consider moving to a newer development platform. Costs of licensing the Visual Studio integrated development environment is hardly a concern for them seeing how they spend upward of the equivalent of four million U.S. dollars on their I.T. budget.

[sheepdog]

Ok, so far the update has not thrown me for a complete loop like it usually does when something changes. I know there are always a few odd bugs to work out, so I don't want to be a nag, but I did find a few things that didn't work, or worked differently. I tried to put a small peice of a post in quote tags in my post like I often and the "wrap in quote tags" button didn't work. But what really bugs me is that when you scroll down the topics list, if you click say for instance on Pets and animals, and then hit the back button if there is nothing there you end up going all the way back to the very top of the forum lists, instead of going back to the spot where you were when you picked a forum to look at. It makes it hard to remember where you were, and you end up going all threw the long list again. Kind of a nusance. I do like where you have the space already waiting for you to reply to this topic at the end of each thread. I just haven't figured out how to respond to a post that isn't at the end of the thread or to one particluar person who has responded, and since I can't get the wrap in quotes to work, it makes it harder to figure out who I am replying to.

But hey, I'm glad they formum is getting some attention from the owner, so I'm not going to complain too much!

[k_nitin_r]

sheepdog, on 27 November 2011 - 06:48 PM, said:

I just haven't figured out how to respond to a post

At the end of each post in a thread, there is a Quote button. I click on it whenever I want to add something from a previous post into my reply so I know who I am replying to if a thread spans multiple pages (I quoted a line from your post, just so we can test it and we know that it works). If I am replying to a single page thread or to posts on the last page of a thread, I simply type in my message and get the word across. BTW, for quoting, you can simply type the quote bbCode tags or select the text that you want to quote and click the quote button on the editor.

I have noticed that many forums use different kinds of editors. In one particular forum, when I click the quote button, it displays a dialog box (not the regular javascript alert or input dialog box but rather one built with HTML and a background layer DIV that shades out the rest of the screen and provides me with a textbox to type in the quoted text or rather copy-paste it into the box. The editor then simply places the quoted text into the message text box surrounded by quote tags. I find the first approach of selecting the text and clicking the quote button less intrusive, as we have here on Knowledge Sutra, but the second approach of displaying a popup style dialog box in HTML is much more user friendly for someone who has not used bbCode or when there isn't a help page to tell users how to use it.

I'm glad they upgraded the forum too. I have seen many websites that run on old software and nobody really wants to get the license for the new software and take the time to migrate from the old version of the software to the new version. Each version of Invision Power Board seems to add new features and with this version we seem to have the progress bar, or more accurately, an activity indicator at the top of the screen so we know that the page is posting back to a server side script.

[mrdee]

One thing I seem to have noticed with the upgrade (or rather, NOT noticed):

It seems like the chat room has gone missing.
Has it been removed from the forum, or is it going to be added later, or have I just missed the link to go to the chat room?

Please let me know, as I quite liked the chat room, it might not have been all that busy, but it WAS fun talking to some people on there.