...

It's obviously easy to do it all in one go, but could old threads be moved during the week and then the active stuff be moved on the final weekend, to reduce overhead, or would that require too much oversight during the week?

That way you would only need to convert a years worth of data on the weekend instead of all 12 years.

Otherwise, we'll get there when we get there.  No Rush.

The old adage

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!

My own learnings suggest …

That if you’ve edited old posts, they may well end up out of order after the conversion.

I’m not editing any posts I care about until this is all done.

Applause

Hi,

applause for finding the error!

Please, in all of the confusion, try to take some time off from the forum conversion in order to get some rest and relax. You've earned it, all of you!

If that moves the conversion to Tuesday...Thursday, that is okay. No need to spend another sleep-deprived weekend right after the first one!

Have fun (and stay healthy)

Profiles link & Contact

So the current forum I used to be able click on a persons user name to get to their profile and be able to send them an email, but today I can not. The link to the user profile is not available, and obviously I'm logged in as I can make this post.

Sending a PM

Just what I do..

Minimum thread comments. No need to get elaborate and post new threads on this old forum. Just maintain a minimum of use. That way, if JoeF does leave some of this drop off and disappear, we are not hurt.

This latest about personal contact is what I had liked. And with the ability on the new forum to get instant chat/when necessary, is a great idea. Especially since we "don't have to accept it". i.e. I can try to chat with you, and if you don't want to, no big deal. Just ignore me.And vice versa. < with big grin>

As for me, I'm like I've already said. Sitting here, just waiting for the big day. Whether it's next Monday or a week from then, or a month. I will enjoy the new forum. And enjoy reading anything anyone wishes to say. If it disappears on the new forum, so what? If it's that important, save it now and repeat it then.

re: Sending a PM

So I snuck around your gate and sent a PM to Joe S. hopefully that didn't cause any issues, sorry about that.

And the instant chats are cool except when a person's company deems them a security risk and blocks them.

Conversion retry also failed

Ouch

Well patience is a virtue and builds stamina for building models.

Thanks for letting us know Joe.

Jack

Welcome….

…. To the wonderful world of IT cutovers.  Been involved in some that were flawless and some that the were absolute disasters.  Hope they get yours to the schmoothe variety.

I guess the question (For

I guess the question (For Joe, to ask Joe and his people) is what is next.  Do they think they have any idea on the issue?  If so how long/expensive will it be and does that make it practical to do or not?

If so no problem.  The only question then is does continuing to use the current forum make things harder on the conversion (probably not but the question needs to considered).

If the conversion is not looking to be practical for technical reasons or the cost to create special programs or whatever then the question is…. Then what.   If the current system can’t be practically converted then the question is can SOME of the system be converted?  If so how much of the forums historical data is actually used?  I know folks do search the archives but I bet the vast majority of users and the vast vast majority of visits never go back more then a couple weeks, unless some individual topics are active for a long time, but as far as inactive topics go I doubt a topic over a month inactive will get accessed.

Anyway just some thoughts for Joe to consider.  And no I don’t want or expect answers,  This is Joe’s forum and his to decide what to do.  I just used to be in IT and as part of my job I had to look at “options” for what happened in various “cases” so we had them planed out and could implement as/if needed so I still have that habit of asking these things…

-Doug M

What’s next

The current conversion has a number of issues …

1. Somehow, this latest conversion broke the new forum formatting (its really bad, trust me). They totally own that issue and I’ve told them they need to fix that issue first before we address anything else.
2. The timestamps out of sequence problem runs from annoying to downright awful at times, but I think we finally have a solution for that.
3. I’ve become aware losing the post title needs dealt with. I’ve found a number of posts where the authors actually started their post in the title. On those posts if you remove the title, the post makes no sense because critical info in the title was lost. The fix is to always add the title on its own line as bold text to the front of the post body. That should be very easy for the developers to do.
4. The developers are not preserving hyperlinks that have descriptive text instead of just the link. For example, on the blog indexes we’ve crested, a blog index entry that says, My Layout Design becomes an https://link without the text. I understand why they do that, it’s because internal links to other forum posts change so dropping the descriptive text and just posting the https://link directly is simpler for the developers. However I have a way they can preserve those descriptive links and they need to be just a bit more diligent.
5. Older posts may not show the images. I understand why — we changed where images are stored several years ago and those older post image links need updated. That’s another database cleanup I need to do before the conversion.

If we do all these things, then we need to do another test conversion to prove it converts properly. Once the test works, then we can finally schedule another forum lockdown conversion weekend. My guess is we’re looking at another conversion attempt in about 30 days.

I hope it all works out

I hope it all works out Joe,...you surely have spent a lot of time trying to get it right.

If I am understanding what happened...

is the conversion didn't "crash", it's the results were a big mess, is that correct?  

Ken L

 

Post title

That is interesting, what I have seen where the post title/subject appears to be the start of the post is when no title/subject has been entered like Doug's question to you. So the first part of the post is displayed in the Subject as well.

Is this what you are referring to? And somehow the conversion removes that text from the body?

Re: post titles

Re: post titles

Hi Jim, all,

In this current forum if the post heading field was left blank, then it was filled automatically with the first few words of the post when the message was posted to the server. 

For some us who use the post title to:

• chunk large concepts that run over several posts, or,
• use it to link related but subsequent posts, or,
• use it to respond with dedicated replies by referring to other post title (as above)

the loss of post headings badly affected the readability of the thread. I was advised after the initial upload (February or thereabouts) that there was no plan or capability to carry over post titles. After playing in the first version of the sandpit I found a way of replicating the lost thread titles by typing in bolded text in the first row of the post. This restored the readability of the topic by indicating which post was related to other posts.

For an example of what post headings might look like in the new forum have a look at my Corrimal thread See  https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/corrimal-colliery-and-its-incline-a-different-slant-on-rails-12206968 The post heading has been added in bold text as planned by Joe in #3 above. Part of what caused the incorrect order display problems of my Corrimal thread to misbehave in the April upload was that only my posts were modified between the first upload (where I noticed the post heading had disappeared) and the April upload. Posts by anyone else in the thread were not modified with post titles. After the ordering problem was detected after April upload, I was given permission to manually edit all postings in this specific thread in sequential order (all 440+ posts). 

For any posts without a post title by others I added a post title in bold as the first line of the post as I had previously done with all my posts. For any of my posts where the post title already existed in bold, I simply added a blank in front of the bolded post title to force an edit to stick. 

To demonstrate how this might work, looking at Page 1, after the initial posts:

• The the post title in the first post by Bernd was initially left blank and automatically added by the system.  
• The post titles for the rest of the posts on that page were filled in prior to posting to the server.
• I simply copied the post title when I did the last run of edits for any post by others.  

Now go to page 2 and ignore any post titles and the bolded text in the first row. Page 2 makes a whole lot less sense if you read it that way. 

The readability and trackability of replies gets a whole lot worse if you have several posters posting to different aspects of a topic almost simultaneously, Especially if you don't have the ability to respond "Re: XXX " or "@someone" in the post title so that the chain of replies has some chance of making some type of logical sense.   

Thanks for finding a possible way forward Joe,   

Post title example that hurts readability

Here’s a loss of post title example that hurts readability.

I ran across a post that reads like this (bolded text is the title) …

On the new forum, the title goes away, and now it reads …

The title was a vital part of the post but because we just drop the post title when converting to the new forum, vital content has gotten lost and now the post makes less sense.

So it’s become apparent titles need to be preserved. The title is right there in the database next to the post body, so it should be very easy for the developers to just add the title text on the front of the converted post body as the first line. Bolding it as well helps make it more obvious that it’s a title.

"The title was a vital part of the post"

  Hi Joe,  It probably depends on the search capabilities of the new forum. If someone looking for SP engine  info could still find it they wouldn't need to see the title to read the post content. I doubt than many folks are going to be re-reading this old stuff anyway so conversation sequence is not as important as the hard info the old posts contain. It's mostly water under the bridge in the overall picture and I think most of us will be moving forward in the new forum.....DaveB

So what about when someone

So what about when someone doesn't enter a post title and the first few words are pulled up from the first paragraph as I have done here. Won't the new forum then have the post title words repeated in the first paragraph?

@Joe

Had you thought of just locking this forum, as you did last weekend and treat this as an archive.

Then starting the new forum from ground zero?

Just transfer the subscriber accounts, we can set our own new passwords and away we go.

I for one have no problem in starting over with my own information.

Starting one thread on my old layouts, another on the new layout and separate threads on my current issues/projects.

If I want any old info, I can just come to the archive forum (this one) and search.

Bad idea

That's a bad idea and would kill MRH entirely. To understand why, read here ...

https://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/43574?page=2#comment-487987

To see why finding all these conversion bugs actually doesn't concern me at all, read ...

https://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/43574?page=3#comment-487997

Re: so what about when someone

Re: so what about when someone

Hi Jim, all

From the previous page - I'll refrain from quoting the previous message to show the value of a topic heading. It's now very obvious which message on the previous page that I was replying to.

My current understanding of how things will appear after the next upload - Short answer is "yes". What was the post heading in the old forum will appear as some bolded text at the top of the text panel in the new forum. 

Can having a post heading contribute to the understanding of the post? Sometimes, if so used by the poster. Sometimes if generated by the system. Sometimes not. But as Joe has shown by his reply above, it is more useful to have a post heading carried over to the new forum rather than not have post headings carried over at all.  

Does having a post heading really inconvenience anyone? Probably not.  It can be ignored if one chooses to.

When this particular post is converted in the next upload it is likely that there will be two lines of bolded text at the top of the text panel - Just ignore one of them. 

@John, yes I guess we can

@John, yes I guess we can ignore the garbage.

I understand there is value, but taking my previous post as an example of what I'm referring too:

I believe on the new forum would become:

Since the title/subject was auto filled in, and as you stated your post will now have two bold titles in the post.

But I guess ignoring the garbage (unnecessary repeats) is better than missing relevant info.