Spring Cleaning 20X8

[Delthazar]

omw to delete ur posts

I'm gonna start pulling on some weeds around here. It's long overdue. It's been a long time coming. It's been... a long rooooad...

All that really means right this moment is that I'ma prune all kinds of shit no one ever uses anymore. That means any thread that hasn't been posted in or even viewed by anyone for one (1!) year is probably about to get the boot, and any active thread older than one (1!) year will be split at Jan 1st 2018 (or the closest 2018 post to that point) and the older stuff tossed aside. This includes The Land of Wind and Ghosts... which might also get cut entirely.

So if there's something in particular you need, uh... just start new threads for stuff? Y'know?

After that I'll probably retire a lot of unused/rarely used emoticons and roll in some fresh ones. BBCodes no one ever uses might also get cut, and some common ones might get newer/better shortcodes. Old functions no one uses but still contributes to server/database bloat will get turned off. RIP attachments. A lot of user profile baggage might go away, like the avatar gallery. Holy shit, remember when forums had avatar galleries? This one does, because it's fucking old.

All of this I can probably get done tonight, but the real work will begin when I start running some backend updates. WHEN THAT HAPPENS I'm probably also gonna need to retire and redo the forum themes and remove/update custom/broken script stuff. So I hope you didn't get too attached to this look. Ehh. I'm kinda bored of how this place looks anyway.

That part of the spring cleaning might not happen immediately but I'll let y'all know when it does. As always, go chat on the Discord if something breaks or if we have to take the board down for extended normal maintenance. In the event that something really doesn't work and we have to nuke the whole thing from orbit just to be sure it probably means I screwed something up and C6 had to come in and clean up my mess. Might be fun to see what a fresh phpBB install looks like in 2018 though.

That is all for now,
- The MGMT

[Delthazar]

Spinning up for updates tonight. Things may break, and even if they don't, things may will look/behave differently for a while afterwards. There's also totes a possibility I'll screw everything up beyond repair 'cause this is all old shit which barely works properly as it is. Who knows. Exciting!

See y'all in hell,
- The MGMT

[Delthazar]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Update complete! On the backend, anyway. Everything that really matters back there is done.

The frontend might take me a while. Our old style is probably totally incompatible unless the author kept it updated into the 3.2 era. Same deal with a lot of our old custom extensions, maybe - I'll find out for sure once I start spelunking through the customization database.

Whatever questionable hackjob of a mod we used to make video embeds work isn't working anymore. I doubt I'm lucky enough for the phpBB folks to actually have added proper video embeds as a standard feature in this, 2018 AD. Ditto with easy Twitter embeds and other 21st century features everything else has had forever.

So I'll see about making those something kinda-sorta resembling a priority after my main priority of getting us off this plain-ass default style. I might just find a temporary (and darker) replacement while I work on something more permanent. No need to tug on my sleeves asking me to change UI elements or add features or whatever 'cause everything you see is liable to change without warning in an instant.

Fun fact: the update package that got us here has unpatched bugs widely reported since early January with fixes buried in official forum posts I only found after about an hour's worth of Googling so that was a fun use of my time, wasn't it.

Fictitiously yours,
- The MGMT

[Delthazar]

Styyyyyyyyle Talk

The good: our previous theme's author, or someone carrying their torch, has kept the base theme updated in lockstep with the current board version and it still looks and works as expected in broad strokes.

The bad: the specific child theme we were using wasn't updated along with the others, so I had to go with the closest facsimile, which... looks similar enough - lots of purple! - but is actually more different than you'd think, and that's all it really takes to throw a lot of little stuff outta whack.

As such, we're probably gonna be without our cool rank flourishes for a while 'til I get around to figuring out how to adapt the old css stuff. Other minor, yet still annoying, little clashes also exist, like the styling for the rules page, announcements, etc. Avatars will be weirdly small until I get around to embiggening them again. Some other little things like page numbers for threads on the forum view are overlapping with thread titles for whatever raisin. And so on.

Mobile responsiveness seems fine though, maybe better than it used to be in some places. YouTube embeds scale properly on my phone browser now, for one, so that's been a long time coming.

Ehh, the rest will get done when it gets done, don't @ me,
- The MGMT

[Delthazar]

Styyyyyyyyle Talk, Cont.

Avatars and avatar background flair restored! You might need to clear your caches, as I did, myself not knowing I had solved the problem for ages after the fact. Now I think I'll take a moment to update that flair to 2018 standards.

Side effect: all or most of your avatars are probably now displaying at 150px whether you uploaded 'em that way or not. I could fix this but I kinda don't care? Y'all should change yer avatars more often anyway. Explore the space. Y'know? Runnin' around here with 64px avatars. What, you thought this was 2002? C'mon.

I found an improved spoiler tag mod but it needs some CSS work to match the theme. I'll get around to that later.

Almost all timestamps throughout the board now display in relative time instead of absolute time. It's a super minor thing that I prefer about a 1000%. I dunno. It doesn't matter. Time is an illusion.

Shepard.
- The MGMT