Forum functionality issues

[hbelkins]

My post count here says 892, but on my posts page, it shows 894. I believe it may be my last two posts before the forum shutdown. I am thinking about deleting them and reposting them.

Who really cares about post count? (That's some "inside baseball" for long-time users.)

[1995hoo]

A forum administrator or three needs a weekend off now nice stiff drinks now.

[intelati49]

A forum administrator or three needs a weekend off now nice stiff drinks now.

No kidding. I can only imagine what a flustercluck it was. 

Hat's off to them

[LM117]

A forum administrator or three needs a weekend off now nice stiff drinks now.

No kidding. I can only imagine what a flustercluck it was. 

Hat's off to them

WTF happened?

[hotdogPi]

A forum administrator or three needs a weekend off now nice stiff drinks now.

No kidding. I can only imagine what a flustercluck it was. 

Hat's off to them

WTF happened?

User threatened DMCA to remove all his posts. Forum was down, and they were all removed via script. This caused some threads to no longer have a most recent post, breaking things. To fix it, some issues regarding non-ASCII encoding happened.

[The Ghostbuster]

Who was the former user who caused the shutdown of the AAROADS Forum? Or can that person not be named due to the threatened legal action against the forum?

[MATraveler128]

The Northeast board shows Ian's name several times. I also had 2 posts deleted since the forum's been offline.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Who was the former user who caused the shutdown of the AAROADS Forum? Or can that person not be named due to the threatened legal action against the forum?

Baloo Uriza according to Steve Alpert.

[hotdogPi]

On my phone, one of the two "news" messages has too large a font size, but the other is fine. This does not occur on my laptop.

[fhmiii]

When I click onto a board, and then go back to the main page, it doesn't seem to update the signal re: new posts.  That is, the signal stays green even though I've visited the board and there are no new posts.

[webny99]

Update: All boards are still showing the green arrow to represent unread posts even after clicking all unread threads in that board, except for GHT and OT, which have a yellow arrow to represent unread posts in child boards. Using the "Mark Read" feature within each board removes the yellow "New!" message from each thread as usual, but the green arrow on the home page remains.

When I click onto a board, and then go back to the main page, it doesn't seem to update the signal re: new posts.  That is, the signal stays green even though I've visited the board and there are no new posts.

I am having an issue with the green arrow still appearing on boards even though I have caught up on posts.

How's that for a sequence of TL;DR's? (With mine being the wordiest, of course. )

[Mr. Matté]

So my name doesn't look silly whilst the non-normal characters are funky, could an admin change my name to "Mr. Matt"?

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Quebec is now Québec. 🦆

Likewise, any time I used the ñ character now appears as ñ. I spell my country's name in my native language as España, not España.

[rickmastfan67]

The Northeast board shows Ian's name several times.

Where exactly?  Ian's name only shows up once for me on the front page as well as inside of that section.

[1995hoo]

The Northeast board shows Ian's name several times.

Where exactly?  Ian's name only shows up once for me on the front page as well as inside of that section.

I just looked at the forum's main page and I see the name "Ian" four times for the Northeast board. It reads sort of like a Burger King jingle: "Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian."

[Alex]

Thanks, it's good to see the forum is back up and running. I believe that was the longest outage there's been (or if not, one of very few) since I joined in 2017.

One small change I've noticed - and I say "change" because I haven't fully judged whether it matters enough to the forum experience to be an "issue" - previously, after clicking on a board, then back to the home page, the green arrow next to that board would turn gray, to represent that board having been viewed. Now, the arrow remains green even after clicking on and off a board several times. My guess would be that the arrow will still turn gray, but only after each individual thread in that board has been viewed, although I haven't tested this yet.

The green arrow indicating unread posts when there are none is one of the issues we are still working on.

A forum administrator or three needs a weekend off now nice stiff drinks now.

No kidding. I can only imagine what a flustercluck it was. 

Hat's off to them

Thanks! I've spent a solid 24 hours working on it this week, it hasn't been fun. The database export made prior to expunging the posts was not 100% complete. This in part because the messages table has well over 1.1 million records, and the SQL export timed out. So this left me with having to piece together what remained.

Another big hassle is that the export did not list the records in numerical order based upon the message id field. So outliers were a regular thing, and trying to reimport sections kept tripping up, as the query would run into an existing record and abruptly stop. Also since the original export was incomplete, I had to go back and adjust or check the table structure on 95 of them within the database to reset primary keys, indexes and auto_increment values.

There is still more potential database work to be done to iron out remaining issues.

Some of the posts on my "unread" show me as the person who last posted. How do I not read my own posts?

If you read the notice at the top of the forum, you can see that the maintenance was "to expunge a number of posts from a banned user".  This might understandably wreak havoc on how thread replies are counted.  My assumption is that what used to be your most recent unread post in a thread is no longer correctly identified as your most recent unread post in the database.

Now, I'm no computer whiz, but my expectation is that this stuff will either (a) work itself out in the wash, so we just have to be patient, or (b) be addressed by the admin team as time allows, but not on a mission-critical timeline, so we just have to be patient.

A lot of back-end work had to be done to un-break the forum, so I'd say that what appears to be 95% functionality is a big success.

Manually removing said posts was too much of an undertaking when we were contending with 2,100 posts and then 1,400 posts with quotes. Eventually I ran some queries directly through the database. This is where issues arose, as it effected things like most recent posts, topics and other PHP structure within the forum software. I am hoping some of this will flush out, but will keep looking for solutions in the meantime.

On my phone, one of the two "news" messages has too large a font size, but the other is fine. This does not occur on my laptop.

I noted this issue on my phone last night when checking the forum. Will see what we can find out about it.

Who was the former user who caused the shutdown of the AAROADS Forum? Or can that person not be named due to the threatened legal action against the forum?

I never interacted with him personally, and he was last active nearly two years ago.

The Northeast board shows Ian's name several times. I also had 2 posts deleted since the forum's been offline.

The moderator name list repeating is an issue I have yet to figure out how to fix. I tried some things last night on it to no avail.

I ended up taking the database dump from the other morning and importing into a new mySQL 5.7 database, and the MariaDB 10.7 database. There may have been a few records lost between the transition, but I attempted to make sure all of the most recent records were included. If post counts changed, that might be just another bug with the queries affecting the database, or related to the database cleanup operations that I ran through SMF yesterday afternoon.

[Alex]

So my name doesn't look silly whilst the non-normal characters are funky, could an admin change my name to "Mr. Matt"?

Let me try to figure out the collation issue with the database tables first.

[Alex]

The Northeast board shows Ian's name several times.

Where exactly?  Ian's name only shows up once for me on the front page as well as inside of that section.

There are a number of regional boards that show moderator names multiple times, with Corco's being the most displayed of all.

[1995hoo]

^^^^^

Whereas on mine, the only two where it happens are Northeast (as noted above, but it's now displaying Ian five times rather than the four I noted earlier) and Mid-Atlantic (currently displaying 74/171FAN three times). Interesting that the occurrences seem to change over time.

[rickmastfan67]

The Northeast board shows Ian's name several times.

Where exactly?  Ian's name only shows up once for me on the front page as well as inside of that section.

There are a number of regional boards that show moderator names multiple times, with Corco's being the most displayed of all.

Weird.  Seems to be hit and miss with that.  I just got it now, but most of the time, I only just get 1 name.

[NE2]

Who was the former user who caused the shutdown of the AAROADS Forum? Or can that person not be named due to the threatened legal action against the forum?

Baloo Uriza according to Steve Alpert.

RIP liberty.

[SkyPesos]

"Threat of legal action by a banned user"

Hmm, I wonder if this bit I saw when the forum was closed gives a clue to said user


EDIT: Never mind, it was mentioned above.

[vdeane]

The copyright character appearing so often with the collation issues is an impressive coincidence, given what happened.  Are we sure Baloo didn't do some black magic voodoo ritual to break the forum?  It would explain too why this happened right after the Fall Equinox, as the dark powers are now ascendant.

In any case, everything that recently happened with the forum does solidify and strengthen a very negative impression I already had from the posts about the OSM edit wars.

A forum administrator or three needs a weekend off now nice stiff drinks now.

No kidding. I can only imagine what a flustercluck it was. 

Hat's off to them

WTF happened?

User threatened DMCA to remove all his posts. Forum was down, and they were all removed via script. This caused some threads to no longer have a most recent post, breaking things. To fix it, some issues regarding non-ASCII encoding happened.

I'd like to coin the term "copyright swatting" for this.

[intelati49]

In any case, everything that recently happened with the forum does solidify and strengthen a very negative impression I already had from the posts about the OSM edit wars.

I'd like to coin the term "copyright swatting" for this.

I'm *terrified* to ask. I don't frequent rhe non-state/region sections... For good reason I guess??

SM-G715U1

[CovalenceSTU]

There are a number of regional boards that show moderator names multiple times, with Corco's being the most displayed of all.

Weird.  Seems to be hit and miss with that.  I just got it now, but most of the time, I only just get 1 name.

I noticed it duplicates the moderator name every time you open the board.

It's also mostly Unicode characters that are messed up, this post of mine is the only one with issues but the first quote gets it right for some reason. Same thing happened to your signature @1995hoo