Forum upgrade coming soon to a browser near you

[Chris Fairbanks]

Team, We have been working behind the scenes for a few months on planning and testing the upgrade of the AAW Forums to the latest and greatest version of XenForo, our forums software. The challenge is, we have been running a version of forum software that originally came out in 2015 and our vendor stopped patching it for security bugs ~2 years ago. The forum staff's main goal with this upgrade was to modernize the site so it was more mobile friendly, security patches by running current software and added additional features that members would like, all while trying to make sure the navigation and overall feel of the forums was a similar as possible to the current forums.

This turned out to be a lot heavier lift than I anticipated but I think we have pulled it off. The current forums are using a theme from the even older version of forums (vBulletin 4) that has long since been retired. With a lot of effort on the staffs part and a small group of very helpful testers, I think we should be able to upgrade the forums later this week or this coming weekend. We have a short list of things to finish up testing, but unless we run into a show stopper you should see the new forums within a week.

New features include;

• new enhanced editor with a bunch of features including cut and paste pictures, drag and dropping of pictures, updated emojis and Gipfy support
• new mobile friendly theming throughout
• upgraded gallery support of 100mb of storage for AAW members
• ability to tag users to forum threads with @username
• better sharing with existing social media platforms and new sharing capabilities for many other platforms
• stronger spam control and numerous admin features to make Bill and Emiliano's lives easier
  
• performance increases throughout the system

There are a bunch of other features and I'll post a thread with all of them and how to use anything new once we get the upgrade done. In the mean time please keep an eye out for an outage notification in the coming days. The upgrade is fairly simple in running the install for the newer software and updating the database but the migration from the old theming to the new theming is challenging. There are over 300 changes I need to implement to make that happen, so I'll keep the site offline during that work. The outage window when I post it will be for four hours but hopefully I can get everything done in 2-3 hours. Finally I am sure we will have missed something with all of these changes, so I'll start a dedicated upgrade thread where anyone can post information about problems they see. We will work on addressing those as quickly as we can but there is no way to rollback the upgrade and keep any posts that happen on the new site so once we migrate we are staying put Thanks!

Screenshot of current test site

 

[Emiliano Achaval]

Thank you for all your work. The new version is outstanding.

 

[hockenbery]

Thank you @Chris Fairbanks

 

[john lucas]

Thanks for all the work. Us non computer people have no idea what you are talking about but making the forum easy for us to use is appreciated at the highest level.

 

[Chris Fairbanks]

John you are most welcome.

 

[Mark Jundanian]

Thanks to all the admin's for all your hard work!

 

[Kirk Amidon]

That is great news, and is quite the undertaking. Looking forward to all the new features.

 

[Donovan Bailey]

As far as I'm concerned I think that all of this "web-stuff" is done by magic...and then I learned that a bunch of careful thought/planning and plain old hard work had to be done by technical wizards like you Chris to make the magic happen. Thank you. We appreciate it. What kind of lathe are you turning on? How about posting some pics (by the way, Al can give you some pointers on how to post pics on your website if needed )

 

[Roger Wiegand]

I've had a sneak peek as a tester, you're going to like it!

 

[hockenbery]

by the way, Al can give you some pointers on how to post pics on your website if needed

Are you asking me? Not sure what your question is

 

[Chris Fairbanks]

What kind of lathe are you turning on? How about posting some pics (by the way, Al can give you some pointers on how to post pics on your website if needed )

Donovan, I’ll post some more about my setup once I get the forums upgraded as that project is taking most of my free time right now. A quick overview; I currently have a small Rikon for my kids to turn on (supervised as they are 7 and 9) and I have a grizzly g0800 upgraded from a jet 1442 about 4 years ago and that was an upgrade from my grandfathers old lathe I think he got from Montgomery wards that I learned to turn on when I was my kids ago.

Up until COVID I traveled nearly full time for work as I work for a decent sized IT consulting firm out of Washington DC. I think I did a little over 160 nights on the road in 2019. So between travel and the kids I have felt like a tool collector more than anything the last few years as I have not had much time to turn. That’s why I rejoined the AAW so I can see all the cool stuff everyone is doing here that I don’t have time to do. I am in the process of reorganization my shop to see if I can somehow cram a CNC in as I need to remodel the kitchen, 3 baths and 5 closets and thinking a CNC will save me some time and suffering in dealing with that much sheet goods. I should have a lot of things put back together this weekend and post some pictures. The lack of work travel has been the only good thing out of this crazy world. Hopefully I won’t have to see an airplane for work until 2022

 

[Lamar Wright]

Thanks Chris for your hard work.

 

[Donovan Bailey]

Are you asking me? Not sure what your question is

I was making a feeble joke, Al.

 

[John Jordan]

All right, thanks for working on it! Easy posting of photos would be great and might get a lot more people posting their work. The makers gallery at woodturner.org is unusable.

John