Forum upgraded and new emoticons

[neptronix]

edit: maintenance is done

Hey all. I have some serious maintenance to do on the server today. It will, unfortunately, involve having the server down for a few hours.

The server will go down at approximately 1:30PM PST. I expect the maintenance tasks to run for around 3 hours due to the time needed to manipulate our huge database and move everything from one server to another. Hoping it will take less time!

[neptronix]

Okay, system was down and back up in 5 minutes.
Kinda overshot the expected downtime, didn't i?

Anyway, i will be tweaking things for the next hour or so. Expect a bug here and there until around 3:30pm PST.

[neptronix]

I have done some tweaks to the performance of the site. One thing got faster, another thing got slower to reduce our hosting costs ultimately..

Let me know if you experience slower performance anywhere. The performance should be roughly equal.

[neptronix]

Came up on a additional pocket of time.
Going to get tapatalk working and the wiki hopefully working.

Waiting on a shit ton of files to transfer first.

[neptronix]

OK, tapatalk is not happening because we lost our old key and i have to beg their support now..
and i'm out of brain juice for the day.
Wiki? next time.

For fun, i busted out adobe illustrator and created some new forum appropriate emoticons while i was at it.



Enjoy!

[markz]

Are the red thread topics new or just new to me?

[jonescg]

None of this
And lots of this

[neptronix]

Are the red thread topics new or just new to me?

That was due to a misconfiguration of a plugin that turned out to not work..
Should be changed.

[danielrlee]

I noticed that ES is now accessible using Tapatalk. Kudos to you Neptronix! It's been missed, so thank you.

[neptronix]

Really? there's no API key in there, which it said i must absolutely have..
Can you post and use all the features?

[danielrlee]

I can view forums, access my subscribed posts and reply without any errors.

[danielrlee]

Just noticed something strange that might have something to do with the missing API key. Each time I close Tappatalk, Endless Sphere disappears from my list of followed forums and I have to search for it, 'follow' the forum, and log in again.

[neptronix]

Sounds about right. I haven't got a response through email yet. I'll poke them again.

[ScooterMan101]

How is Tapatalk better on mobile devices than using a browser like google chrome or IE to find Eneless-Sphere ?

Does Tapatalk allow the user to speak to the cell phone/mobile device to search for the different sections and individual threads on E.S. ?

Since I only use one online Fourm ( E.S. ) so is Tapatalk even necessary ?

I noticed that ES is now accessible using Tapatalk. Kudos to you Neptronix! It's been missed, so thank you.

[neptronix]

Just noticed something strange that might have something to do with the missing API key. Each time I close Tappatalk, Endless Sphere disappears from my list of followed forums and I have to search for it, 'follow' the forum, and log in again.

Ok, i found and entered the old tapatalk key.
Would you mind testing this for me and letting me know how it goes?
I also tried to disable ads on tapatalk. Let me know if you see ads or not.

scooterman;
Tapatalk is an external service for making phpbb and other forums it nicer to use on mobile phones.
This was more relevant before phpbb was actually mobile compatible. We made the switch to an improved mobile compatible version a bit ago, but from what i understand, the experience on tapatalk is just better enough for people to use the external app.

No, it doesn't do magic voice to text translation.

[Tom]

I noticed the unread post icons are now missing in the SE Square NX theme. These are the small square icons that appear to the left of the topic title when there are new unread posts. If I switch to another theme the unread post icons show up again. I tested in another browser just to make sure I hadn't blocked the image. The icons still show up in mobile display, but not desktop.

[danielrlee]

Just noticed something strange that might have something to do with the missing API key. Each time I close Tappatalk, Endless Sphere disappears from my list of followed forums and I have to search for it, 'follow' the forum, and log in again.

Ok, i found and entered the old tapatalk key.
Would you mind testing this for me and letting me know how it goes?
I also tried to disable ads on tapatalk. Let me know if you see ads or not.

scooterman;
Tapatalk is an external service for making phpbb and other forums it nicer to use on mobile phones.
This was more relevant before phpbb was actually mobile compatible. We made the switch to an improved mobile compatible version a bit ago, but from what i understand, the experience on tapatalk is just better enough for people to use the external app.

No, it doesn't do magic voice to text translation.

Nep, you da man! When I opened Tapatalk this morning, I noticed ES appeared there for the first time in ages, so I thought you'd found the API key before I saw your post.

Everything appears to be working as it should. I am running the paid for VIP Tapatalk and don't ever see advertisements, so on unable to tell you what users of the free version see.

[danielrlee]

Neptronix summed Tapatalk up pretty well. Primarily, it provides a fast, clean and streamlined way to access forums through a mobile. There are other benefits, but they are secondary to those already mentioned.

FYI, Android features a voice to text feature that can be used in any app if that's what you're after. Just press the microphone icon when the keyboard is open to start voice recognition.

[neptronix]

I noticed the unread post icons are now missing in the SE Square NX theme. These are the small square icons that appear to the left of the topic title when there are new unread posts. If I switch to another theme the unread post icons show up again. I tested in another browser just to make sure I hadn't blocked the image. The icons still show up in mobile display, but not desktop.

Hey, i removed those in the recent round of cleaning things up.
Sometimes those icons were redundant ( like on the list of forum ), and the font on the post date is larger than stock, so it's rather easy to find out if you read a post or not these days.

[nicobie]

I found the unread icons very useful. They saved a lot of time getting to where the new posts are.

Did they really slow things down on the forum enough to be called redundant? Every other forum I have ever been on has them.

[neptronix]

No, but i cleaned up the look to free up space on the mobile view in particular so that i can reposition and compact things in the user profile area ( it sometimes unnecessarily lengthens posts and could look a lot better, IE more like vbulletin. )

If this is a deal breaker for you, i can make a custom variant of my theme that rolls back the changes made last week.
Let me know if this matters enough to you and i will make it happen.

[Tom]

Yes, it's harder to differentiate unread threads without the icons. It's standard protocol in almost every forum software. The funny thing is you didn't remove them in the mobile view. At least not mine.

[neptronix]

You just have an outdated CSS file on your mobile phone.
They will go away after a couple refreshes.

I will make another theme today or tomorrow and attach instructions on how to upgrade it.

Side note: a grand total of 9 people have the milk theme enabled, but it was broken since the day we installed it. That theme is going to go bye-bye because we cannot support it in the future.

[Tom]

That's fine. I really just wasn't sure why the icons disappeared. Having run a forum for almost 20 years I would say a surprising number of people don't even know how to use the unread icons. So if you are going to tweak anything just have clicking on the topic title go to the first unread post (who wants to go back to page 1 by default)?

[neptronix]

Nep, you da man! When I opened Tapatalk this morning, I noticed ES appeared there for the first time in ages, so I thought you'd found the API key before I saw your post.

Everything appears to be working as it should. I am running the paid for VIP Tapatalk and don't ever see advertisements, so on unable to tell you what users of the free version see.

Cool, thanks for getting back to me.
Sorry it had been gone so long. I was hesitant to install plugins we couldn't support long term before a planned update to the forum software.