A sample of moving this board to a private server

[The Gorn]

Looks great. Slicker than YUKU. When should we check our PM for new passwords?

Thanks. For you and some others that deal with slower connections, the big win here will be no more stupid video ads.

I am working on some integration kinks. I will make the move next week sometime, probably. I'll explain everything in a later post.

Origisaurus - yes, unless I find some fatal flaw, I am committed to this move.

[The Gorn]

One of the goals I had in moving this discussion group to a new server was to implement the ability to create non forum content, like pages, commented stories, or downloadable galleries.

As some of you may recall, I really like Drupal and I have used it successfully on several web sites.

I found that there is an integration bridge between Drupal and SMF. I just got it working. You can see an early result here (Drupal frames the discussion board.)

http://www.it-proletariat.com/forums

The idea is that when you log into SMF, you also get logged into the "main site" (Drupal) with the same credentials. I got it working, and I experimented with creating a new user, which then got reflected to Drupal. So you have one common login for the whole site.

Why is this a big deal?

Because there is a lot of content that just doesn't work as a discussion topic. One feature I want to support is to permit members here to post their own stories, white papers, guidelines, etc. Content like that gets buried in a discussion format.

And, oh, yeah - this test site is running on http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net , the "fractional web host" provider where you only get charged for what you use. For everything I am doing here, the response time is really good (at least what I am seeing.) I imagine I will be using money a little faster from my account with this site in play.

[Origisaurus]

[The Gorn]

Have you provided for profiles, including sig lines?

Hey! You're lucky you get a thin gruel of dirty water every other day!

No. The only user specific information that seems to survive is the user name and the avatar graphic.

[Origisaurus]

Have you provided for profiles, including sig lines?

Hey! You're lucky you get a thin gruel of dirty water every other day!

No. The only user specific information that seems to survive is the user name and the avatar graphic.

OK.  What I should have asked, and this seems a bit more reasonable, is "What features of yucky will be migrated, and which will be lost?".

[The Gorn]

OK.  What I should have asked, and this seems a bit more reasonable, is "What features of yucky will be migrated, and which will be lost?".

The most visible feature that we are losing is threaded discussions. See my earlier comments on this. As implemented by yucky, threaded discussions are a bit of a pain to use here, so I see this as no big loss. Discussions will now be flat. And as noted, we can split and splice threads to accommodate thread drift.

All messages, as far as I can tell at present, will be migrated. The script seems to lose a few message bodies but 99.99% of the messages seem to get through OK.

As noted, user profiles as such don't get migrated. The URL that the script scrapes is here: http://openitforum.yuku.c...omainstats/activemembers

Only the user name, avatar graphic, board join date, and post counts are extracted, using the content of this page and its following pages.

I will protect the private discussion section's contents and I will carry the same people over to have visibility into the new board's private section.

I intend to retain the same members as moderators and admin, under the same user names.

The point is, the migration is just user names and posts. I have to manually handle the security aspects (as such) myself. And the profile info is Yuku specific anyway.

A BIG "feature" that we lose is the brain dead non functional search of yucky. Search works GREAT on the new board.

[The Gorn]

I just sent several passwords out to members who have expressed an interest in the new board. This also proved that the automated password distribution is working. 

If you didn't get a message and you want to look around or try posting a message, please post a reply here and I will send you a password in the next day.

[I D Shukhov]

I thought you had decided to use Phorum because it was threaded.   I didn't see how SMF had a threaded view.

[The Gorn]

This is a copy of a reply to someone else about why SMF and why not anything else.

I did some Google-ing with keywords like "yuku export" and that lead me to a script that a guy on the support forums for simplemachines.org, the  home of SMF, had written to do scraping of Yuku into SMF.

I was already aware of SMF. A large forum I visit, urbanohio.com, is hosted with SMF and the admins there seem to have only good things to say about it.

So I did an install of SMF and I tried the forum export that this one user wrote. After working through some kinks with the help of the author, it now works perfectly.

So, the availability of this export script for converting Yuku messages to SMF sort of dictated using SMF, although I probably could have munged the SQL output to suit other board  software.  But I really liked SMF, the more I played with it.

I found when I looked around that SMF has an extremely strong user community (witness the availability of this conversion from Yuku to SMF as a prime example) and Phorum's didn't hold a candle to it.

True, Phorum is threaded. And that's one thing that SMF does not have. But as I mentioned earlier in this thread, threading doesn't buy us a whole lot on Yuku because of how it is implemented. And SMF has great support for splitting and merging threads that go into tangents.

I also really liked the clean layout of SMF.

[I D Shukhov]

It *is* clean, and I like how it looks. What I've had difficulty with with non-threaded message boards, is how do you respond to someone several messages up?  I guess when I start using it I'll see if they have a quote function that can help out with this. 

Please send me a password when it goes live.   Thanks for setting this up.

[The Gorn]

It *is* clean, and I like how it looks. What I've had difficulty with with non-threaded message boards, is how do you respond to someone several messages up?  I guess when I start using it I'll see if they have a quote function that can help out with this. 

It has the same kind of reply functions that we use here. You can quote a message or reply from scratch.

[unix]