Forum upgrade completed

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rjlittlefield
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Re: Bugs in forum upgrade conversion

Post by rjlittlefield »

iconoclastica wrote:
Sat Jun 27, 2020 3:05 am
rjlittlefield wrote:
Fri Jun 26, 2020 9:12 pm
Just so you know, I have encountered a couple of bugs in the upgraded forum:
  1. I was too optimistic when I thought that all saved URLs would still function properly. It turns out that there has been a slight change in the use of anchors, so that old format URLs that reference specific postings will no longer jump to the correct place on the page. (The change is that what used to be "#12345" is now "#p12345".) I have no idea yet what to do about that either.
Do you have access to the database?

Wim--
Yes, and to the new source code for the forum software. At this moment, my inclination is to mod the source code so as to make the emitted HTML contain an old-format anchor (<a name="12345">) as well as a new style div ID (<div id="p12345" ... >). That would restore to operation old links no matter where they are kept, for example in Google search results, in other forums, and in email communications. Maybe somebody has an extension that already does this. If not, then it's "just" a matter of finding and tweaking some PHP code. The major challenge may be in finding the code to be tweaked, since the phpBB software tree has now grown to over 500K lines of PHP.

--Rik

iconoclastica
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by iconoclastica »

I have had similar issues with wiki-software. Finding the code and adapting is one approach indeed. Only, when updates are frequent, it has to be redone every time again. Instead I wrote a simple script inspecting every page in the database and perform the changes there.

This post seems to be doing something quite similar.

There's a suggestion here the .htaccess is the key, but there's too much I don't anderstand in that post...
--- felix filicis ---

rjlittlefield
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by rjlittlefield »

It turns out that there has been a slight change in the use of anchors, so that old format URLs that reference specific postings will no longer jump to the correct place on the page. (The change is that what used to be "#12345" is now "#p12345".)
The anchor problem turned out to be much more simple than I expected.

It turns out that the HTML in question is controlled by template files in the style definitions, not by anything in the PHP code.

So, the fix appears to be a matter of inserting one line into template/viewtopic_body.html in each style tree.

I have modified PMN-photoforum and AllenStyle-SUBSILVER to do this.

Old links in my own records appear to be working correctly now.

--Rik

micro_pix
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by micro_pix »

Thanks for all of your hard work Rik, it looks good.

David

rjlittlefield
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another style added

Post by rjlittlefield »

I've added another user-selectable style to the system.

This is PMN-subsilver . It's a variant of AllenStyle-SUBSILVER, converted to neutral gray instead of blue-gray, and with a few other customizations and bug fixes for problems that I ran across in testing.

It can be selected as described earlier:
rjlittlefield wrote:
Wed Jun 24, 2020 1:30 pm
...proceed as follows:
  1. In the menu that pulls down from your username at upper right of page, go to the User Control Panel.
  2. Click on the tab labeled "Board preferences".
  3. In the "Edit global settings" section, modify the selection at "My board style".
  4. Click the Submit button. For about 5 seconds you should see a reply that "Your board preferences have been updated", and then the page will repaint in the selected style.
--Rik

rjlittlefield
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Re: Bugs in forum upgrade conversion

Post by rjlittlefield »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Fri Jun 26, 2020 9:12 pm
  1. In some old postings, non-ASCII characters such as "¿Qué tal estás?" rendered properly before the conversion but now appear scrambled. At this moment I have no idea why some and not others, or what to do about them. I do still have a copy of the old software and database, so in principle all the material is recoverable, but I have no idea whether that's practical.
This problem is now fixed, I believe. It affected a few hundred posts and private messages. I still have no idea why some but not others. But anyway, by comparing against the old version of the software and database, I was able to develop a set of 33 Unicode string substitutions, like REPLACE(message_text,'ü','ü'), which I then applied against text fields in the new database until a scan of the database backup showed no more instances to change.

I spot-checked the public posts, but I applied the string substitutions blind against the private message tables.

Please let me know if you notice any difficulties.

--Rik

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