Page 1 of 2

[Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2017 12:02 pm
by paroj
As you probably have already noticed I upgraded the forums software to a more recent version. The downside is that the Kudos/ Thanks plugin is not supported with the new version any more.

However we get security updates (which is quite important) and a responsive theme which works well on mobile devices (is it 2017 already?). Additionally I added the lightbox extension for better image viewing and the postimage extension (lower left of the editor) for easy image uploading.

Attention
The Addons forums will get shut down by the end of the year. If you wonder what I am talking about just ignore this information. If you are one of the ~10 people that has used these forums these year: please back up the content you need. If you are an addon author, consider creating a new thread on the main forums instead.

The addon forums are currently a completely different forum instance which duplicates the maintenance work (and requires users to sign up twice) but is hardly used.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2017 5:23 pm
by EricB
Anyway to get just an archived version of the addon's forum? Speaking as one of the 10 who still use 2 or 3 of the dead projects on there for commercial production, It would be a complete shame to lose all that information that is on there.

https://automatthias.wordpress.com/2016 ... c-archive/


Alternatively, I could probably crawl the entire forum for you guys if you want to host the raw data if you have no other means of archiving it.

Also can we darken the background on the main forums some. The white is blinding.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2017 6:42 pm
by xrgo
Really great work with the new forum, thank you so much!! but I am going to miss my kudos :roll:
I like the idea of ditching the addon forums, but I think its really important archive it somewhere, a few times some info I found there has saved my life.
EricB wrote:Also can we darken the background on the main forums some. The white is blinding
+1 I think that's a good Idea

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sun Oct 08, 2017 8:16 pm
by paroj
thanks for the hint. phpbb3-static looks indeed like a promising solution. Will give it a try.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 3:40 am
by frostbyte
more recent version. The downside is that the Kudos/ Thanks plugin is not supported with the new version any more.
drrr...some one moved my cheeze.... :cry:
i was just about to give xrgo some kudos for his awesome contributions( best ocean waves i've seen )
now i'll need to resolve to mushy personal gratitudes...oh well....

anyway, now that kudos are gone and as i don't like working for free, i would like to withdraw my kudos.
bitcoin will be fine with me... 8)

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 4:06 am
by xrgo
frostbyte wrote:i was just about to give xrgo some kudos for his awesome contributions( best ocean waves i've seen )
damn =/

hey you still have the 64K kudos for that post =D

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 2:07 am
by frostbyte
it's depressing, now we are just a bunch of guys with nick-names and no kudos
i think i'll need to depart ogre and move my project to another engine, one that has a kudos system :?
on the bright side: at least now we know what it feels to live in a world where money is no longer :wink:

xrgo: just move your conributions to github, they have a STAR system :D
i promise to be there for you, once i find out what my password is...

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 9:00 am
by hyyou
frostbyte wrote:it's depressing, now we are just a bunch of guys with nick-names and no kudos
1 kudo for frostbyte for the post.

I didn't get so much kudo as frostbyte, but I feel the same.

The counterfeit-money system encourage people, including me, to post some awesome things.
Lacking the kudo feature will reduce contribution of people in a very long-run.
Ogre is a high quality software, but the marketing side is equally important.

A few years ago, I didn't know how good is Ogre.
I was so scared to invest huge amount of time to a certain thing.
With limited information, I had to evaluate it.
My criteria were quality and quantity of forum post / wiki.
All of them were very impressive, so I induced that Ogre is a high quality software.

Kudo encourage people to answer in the help forum for free - which is necessary for free software like Ogre.
I guess that, without kudo system, the impressive-level that I encountered would be lower.

People are very crazy about the so-called reputation system, fake internet point and yellowish badge ... e.g. stackoverflow.

Hopefully, lacking a "fake" score system would be temporary.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 11:55 am
by syedhs
I think the Ogreaddons need to stay, but probably move it to the same server as this forum (if it has not?) and make it read-only. There could be still some gold mines underneath addon forum that make it still worth..
But you mentioned 10 people still using it? Is it active forummers or just lurkers?

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 6:32 am
by dermont
That's sad that the Addons forum will be going downdown, always took an interest in python-ogre and always thought that MOGRE had a healthy user base.
I guess it's difficult to maintain some of the addons without a stable release and the current Ogre user base probably doesn't justify a separate addons forum.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:02 pm
by paroj
frostbyte wrote:
more recent version. The downside is that the Kudos/ Thanks plugin is not supported with the new version any more.
drrr...some one moved my cheeze.... :cry: )
hyyou wrote:I didn't get so much kudo as frostbyte, but I feel the same.
xrgo wrote:damn =/
ok guys, you can stop crying, I have added an extension that allows you to spread love. You just need to figure out a trading rate to kudos..

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 2:26 pm
by xrgo
Yay! Love for you!
Thank youuuu

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 3:01 pm
by paroj
dermont wrote:That's sad that the Addons forum will be going downdown, always took an interest in python-ogre
python-ogre was replaced by the Python Component in Ogre 1.10. The according forum had not posts this year.
dermont wrote:and always thought that MOGRE had a healthy user base.
There were some posts this year, however they were only resolved when cross-posted on the main forums.
dermont wrote: I guess it's difficult to maintain some of the addons without a stable release and the current Ogre user base probably doesn't justify a separate addons forum.
Note that the addons are not going away - just the largely orphaned forums.
syedhs wrote: There could be still some gold mines underneath addon forum that make it still worth..
if you could dig out some "gold" posts/ threads as example, it would motivate me putting work into it ;)

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 3:42 pm
by EricB
paroj wrote: if you could dig out some "gold" posts/ threads as example, it would motivate me putting work into it ;)
We shouldn't have to go through and pluck information we've used in the past out of the addon forums to prove to you that we use this information. I've used both the QuickGUI and the OgreOggSound forums this past year on a couple of issues. Did I post? No, I did not, because the information I needed was already in there. It allowed me to fix the issue I was having and I moved on.

It would be a great shame on Ogre development team to willfully lose programming data, bug work around, instructions on how to use some of these libraries where there is no other documentation, and other various information in this day and age. Specially since I already gave you 2 methods in which you can back up the data statically, and offered a third method of page creation (although messy). Not to mention several people on the IRC (often neglected by the dev team) have suggested you should approach archive.org if you're unable to do it yourself.

I personally would have to reconsider contributing to these forums if you are willing going to throw away information you deem to be "Old" or "Unused" especially when there are several people mentioning we use it. I rely on two of the projects in Addons forums, my only resources to help me if I run into an issue with those libs is those old addon posts. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Anyway, if I see no action on this, I'll mirror them my self next month with a web crawler. God help Ogre's server when I unleash my Google Fiber on it. :twisted:


PS. Sorry if I sound a bit harsh. Data loss is a big no no in my opinion. It's not something to be fooled around with. Plus I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. :)



And as a kudoswhore, thank you for the hearts. Better than nothing! :)

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 6:59 pm
by paroj
EricB wrote: It would be a great shame on Ogre development team to willfully lose programming data..
thanks, the necessary level of complaining was reached. see http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/

also there are redirects in place, so old links still work: http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewt ... 20&t=10925

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 1:23 am
by EricB
paroj wrote: thanks, the necessary level of complaining was reached. see http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/

also there are redirects in place, so old links still work: http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/viewt ... 20&t=10925
Wonderful! Many thanks and I take back my harsh complaints. :) Have a heart!

(Now just need to get google to read spider the page a few times so it shows up in the search results.)

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:06 am
by Zonder
Would be good to add the google custom search box to it the root page as well maybe. thinking on that the main forum could do with it as well due to the over 3 chars required on search.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 11:07 pm
by paroj
aaand... we are on phpbb 3.2 now, which brings emoji support. finally. 👍😎

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 12:36 am
by xrgo
😀😱👽💩🖖

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 1:01 am
by xrgo
btw, all day I thought the forums were down, it keep redirecting me to ogre3d.org... now I entered in my phone and worked, so I cleared the cookies on mi pc browser and now I can enter. Maybe there are more people thinking the forums are down?

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 9:25 am
by al2950
xrgo wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2017 1:01 am btw, all day I thought the forums were down, it keep redirecting me to ogre3d.org... now I entered in my phone and worked, so I cleared the cookies on mi pc browser and now I can enter. Maybe there are more people thinking the forums are down?
Yes I had the same issue

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 8:34 pm
by dark_sylinc
Yeah, Paroj had been moving the server in steps (i.e. for a time being parts of the website were hosted in two servers at the same time) because it's huge; and he now migrated the forums and the DNS took time to propagate. We all had the same issue as well, for some lasted longer than others.

Paroj does great things but he's not very good at telling me he's about to do it so I can properly tell everyone via Twitter we're about to go down. :lol:

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 9:25 pm
by dermont
dark_sylinc wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2017 8:34 pm Yeah, Paroj had been moving the server in steps (i.e. for a time being parts of the website were hosted in two servers at the same time) because it's huge; and he now migrated the forums and the DNS took time to propagate. We all had the same issue as well, for some lasted longer than others.

Paroj does great things but he's not very good at telling me he's about to do it so I can properly tell everyone via Twitter we're about to go down. :lol:
I'm still having the same problem no matter how may times I clear my browser cache. I can only connect to the forums using a proxy.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 3:49 am
by dark_sylinc
DNS can take days to fully spread. You may be lucky if "ipconfig /release" combined with resetting your router fixes the issue for you, but the issue may still be with your DNS provider.

One way to solve that is to change your DNS provider to Google (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) or OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) instead of the ones provided by your ISP.

I'm using Google's and that one works.

Re: [Announcement] Forums updated/ Addon forums to go down

Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 12:13 pm
by dermont
Thanks I'm already using Google as a DNS provider (2001:4860:4860::8888 / 2001:4860:4860::8844) for IPv6. I'll try again in a few days.