Downtime and Forum Migration!

The LDSTech forum will experience some scheduled downtime today as the LDSTech team migrates from vBulletin to phpBB. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you'd like to learn more about phpBB feel free to visit https://www.phpbb.com/about/.

-The LDSTech Team

Looks like the migration went well. Feel free to post in this thread anything that does not work as well as it should.

I monitored new posts on the old board using the RSS feed and Google Reader. I don't see a feed for the new board. While I read that phpBB doesn't support RSS directly, it can do an ATOM-formatted feed, which should work. Maybe it's not turned on? If so, is this by intent or by accident? And, if it is on, can someone point out the URL?

Thanks.

bdayley wrote:I monitored new posts on the old board using the RSS feed and Google Reader. I don't see a feed for the new board. While I read that phpBB doesn't support RSS directly, it can do an ATOM-formatted feed, which should work. Maybe it's not turned on? If so, is this by intent or by accident? And, if it is on, can someone point out the URL?

Thanks.

bdayley, Atom feeds are enabled, but there are no links to said feeds in the template. I'm opening a ticket to include feed links in the template. In the mean time you can access a Topic specific feeds by changing the word viewtopic.php to feed.php in the url of any topic (ie the feed for this top is https://tech.lds.org/forum/feed.php?f=4&t=14445). If you want a feed for the forum as a whole or any sub-forums you can add the url of the forum or the sub-forum to your feed reader.

To find out more about phpBB atom feeds feel free to read this article on them.

Congratulations!

Service with a smile.... any kind of notice would be nice... it'd feel more like an actual community

JohnShaw wrote:Service with a smile.... any kind of notice would be nice... it'd feel more like an actual community

I apologize that is my fault.

On the main page I used to be able to collapse the categories of forums. I had "what's new" and "community discussions" collapsed (the first two groups) so that "church technologies" was the first open group because that's what I use most of the time. I looked through all the "user control panel" settings and didn't see anything that would control the main page.

Also, in the control panel > board preferences > edit global settings, the only choice for language is "british english" so I'm getting "font colour" instead of my preferred "font color".

sasgrw wrote:On the main page I used to be able to collapse the categories of forums. I had "what's new" and "community discussions" collapsed (the first two groups) so that "church technologies" was the first open group because that's what I use most of the time. I looked through all the "user control panel" settings and didn't see anything that would control the main page.

One option if you are using FireFox is to use a GreaseMonkey script to modify the page. I have one that I just wrote that does this. I would attach it, but I don't see how. If you are interested in the script you can PM me and I'll send it to you.

JonesRK wrote:One option if you are using FireFox is to use a GreaseMonkey script to modify the page. I have one that I just wrote that does this. I would attach it, but I don't see how. If you are interested in the script you can PM me and I'll send it to you.

I appreciate the offer but I'm hoping the functionality we had before can be restored. I just wanted to point out a feature that was missing after the 'upgrade'.

sasgrw wrote:I appreciate the offer but I'm hoping the functionality we had before can be restored.

vBulletin and phpBB are quite uniquely different in many aspects. Expecting functionality to be restored is like asking LibreOffice Writer to be exactly like MS Office Word. The moderators are having to deal with the loss of some significant features we grew accustomed to having. But there are also some features unique to phpBB that are nice to have. One of those is a significantly better search feature.

I am not saying you should stop asking for features. But we must at some point realize that some things are just not going to be possible.

I used to be able to edit a post I'd made after submitting it. It doesn't appear I can do that now. It would be good if I could. I sometimes read my posts after posting them and realize I need to reword things to clarify them, or someone points out a problem and I correct it. I can't do that now...or at least if I can I haven't figured out how.

mevans wrote:I used to be able to edit a post I'd made after submitting it. It doesn't appear I can do that now. It would be good if I could. I sometimes read my posts after posting them and realize I need to reword things to clarify them, or someone points out a problem and I correct it. I can't do that now...or at least if I can I haven't figured out how.

According to the Church employee who helps manage the Forum: "I updated the permissions to allow users to delete/edit their own posts for up to 1hr from the time of posting" (14 Dec 2012).

Are you trying to do this within one hour, or later than that?

aebrown wrote:According to the Church employee who helps manage the Forum: "I updated the permissions to allow users to delete/edit their own posts for up to 1hr from the time of posting" (14 Dec 2012).

Are you trying to do this within one hour, or later than that?

Thanks for your timely reply within one hour of my post...as I'm reading your reply, I see I can edit my previous post. I wonder why the restriction? On the old system I could edit my posts whenever.

If there's going to be a time restriction, I suggest it be more than an hour (or maybe I need to increase my perfection ). Usually I fix things within an hour, but sometimes it comes later, like after someone questions a factual error in a post and I want to correct it so future people reading it don't get confused. Or maybe after I wake up the next day and realize I wrote something incoherent before going to bed.

mevans wrote:I wonder why the restriction? On the old system I could edit my posts whenever.

I know that on the old system regular users couldn't delete their posts for very long after the posts were created. I don't recall the details on editing restrictions.

The reason for the restriction is that once a post becomes part of a discussion, edits (and particularly deletions) to posts can make the discussion very confusing. For example, User #1 says "I had experience A" and User #2 responds "That wasn't my experience -- I had experience B" and then User #1 edits his post to say "I had experience B"; User #2's post will then look like he can't read very well.

Clearly these concerns don't apply to some clarifications or fixing obvious typos. But it's often better to make clarifications in a subsequent post, anyway. And for other edits or deletions that you think need to be made, you're welcome to send a private message to any moderator or administrator and if we think the edit is reasonable, we'll be happy to take care of it for you.