How to get logged in for the first time

One "glitch"

Fyi

My first post is still gone in my blog, same as last time.  The conversion still seems to be glitching on long initial posts that have been split via moderators.  And then I noticed that about the next dozen or so posts are also gone, which is actually more troublesome than last time.  My hunch is its missing the entire first page of posts.  I’ll have to check other threads to try and confirm that.

Seems odd that as step one in the process that they don’t just write a sequence number into each legacy record (post) within each thread, and use that to determine the order to write records into the new empty database.  This would facilitate a before and after record count as well to confirm that all records in each thread have been preserved.

I’m used to conversions with millions of records that have to be perfect to pass audits.  Like SAP utility billing conversions, or massive health records systems. Not sure whats up with this, but it isn’t making sense. Its almost like they are relying on an inconsistent and unreliable key to order the source file, but that doesn't explain the missing records  unless they're somewhere else in the thread and out of order.

Good One.....

 Good one Joe, made me laugh. I'll wait. Really looking forward to the new site. Good job to you and all involved..

The new forum

The new forum uses the posting date to establish order. If posts are "missing" look through the entire thread to make sure they didn't just end up further down the thread.

They can't "fake" the order with something else (this old forum uses comment id to establish order and timestamps can be off). Because the new forum design uses timestamp for ordering, that's a baked in design fundamental and isn't easily circumvented.

It appears this old forum uses your local machine time to establish a timestamp (which it resets to Greenwich time first), so some posts have wildly off timestamps if folks don't have their machine date-time set properly. You get your post id when you start a post -- but if you take a while to compose your post -- and if your timestamp is off a timezone or two -- you can end up posting something after an earlier post that has a timestamp that's several hours earlier than posts before it.

That said, I did ran a process to correct timestamps (it tries to make sure the next post is later than the one before it, and if it finds stuff out of order, it keeps looking until it finds where the timestamps go back in order, then tries to divide out the time difference a spread it across all the out-of-order block of posts -- and it got most of the out-of-order timestamps -- there were 69,000 out-of-sequence timestamps.

But I know it missed stuff still. If some timestamps are still messed up (hopefully just a few hundred now), we can fix them manually for the next load.

Testing 29th Oct Pt1

Dear Joe,

Having a look around, noticing a few things:

1 - Cannot Insert an Image that has been pre-uploaded into a Album,
hitting the "Insert Image" button on a post_only_ gives the User the ability to "upload an image" (from their PC),
OR
Link an image by providing the URL...

2 - attempting to post a "test message" threw a RED TEXT on RED BACKGROUND error
(which was quite hard to read), stating:

Happy to post the content of the test message somewhere for eval...

EDIT: took a screenshot of the "offending" post, and then culled-it-down to see what was tripping the system over... literally had to take it down to 

before it would be accepted...??

https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/test-from-prof-k-12033510?pid=1329495434#post1329495434

Happy Modelling,
Aiming to test ASAP,
Prof K 

Testing 29th Oct Pt2

Joe,

Looks like "SHIFT + ENTER" to get a "Paragraph break" is not working.

IE using "SHIFT + ENTER" gives a Paragraph break
(a full clear line between the paragraph you just finished and the next paragraph beginning)

within the "Drafting" WYSIWYG box,

but when the message is POSTED, all such "paragraph breaks" are handled as regular "line breaks",
IE move to next line, but do not insert a clear line between the previous and next sentences-of-text

Prof K

PS NB that this
"SHIFT + ENTER = Paragraph Break, ENTER = Line-break" behaviour is exactly the opposite of the current (old) forum. Not a biggy, if they work consistently and are respected from "composition dialog box" --> "as posted" , but it may give some users some confusion...

Testing 29th Oct Pt3

Dear Joe,

On the "compose a message" interface,

using the "Insert Image" --> "URL"

using an image which has been pre-uploaded to a user Album,
(and opening that image in a "new tab" to get a direct URL ending in ".JPG" or similar)

EG https://d28lcup14p4e72.cloudfront.net/259338/6966142/lilbeaver-750x410.jpg

The image DID Insert, and the message "posted OK",

BUT

The "preview image" which is meant to appear on the "URL dialog",
as a confirmation that "this URL is acceptable", 

did NOT appear, leaving the User in an "is the URL OK or not?" confused state...
(for testing purposes, I ignored the "missing preview image" and hit the "Insert" button, 
which did actually allow the image to insert into the message composition box, and be posted...   )

Prof K

Locked

It appears that any topics locked in the old forum are not locked in the new forum.  More of an FYI than a problem.

Update on missing, badly re-ordered posts

So yes, the missing posts are there, but quite out of sequence, which is weird as these had previously been “fixed” if you recall.  As long as the old forum remains accessible in a read only way, I certainly don't mind reordering things in my blog and construction/conversion threads to get them back to the proper order presuming facilities exist to do this n the new forum.

I note that many of my “how to” threads are suffering from severe re-ordering.  The recent machine shop thread for example is substantially out of order which in my view removes a lot of critical context.  

Some Decoder conversion threads are also out of sequence which will render them ineffective.

i found occasional occurrences of missing text on hyperlinks - only the url is shown, and not linked, just text.

Re my comments on sequence, records would have to be written into a new “hold” database with extra fields for the purpose of implementing correct sequencing on their way to the final repository.  Again, pretty normal stuff in a conversion, but I claim zero experience with the back end of Drupal.  

Spam

It appears that there is no way to deal with spam aside from deleting the post - is that correct? 

Blog link challenge met

Of course, I don't have hundreds of posts to look through...

This is not close to acceptable

Joe et al.,

At MRH's original recommendation, most of my blog posts are of the form: Short titled intro sometimes with one pic, followed by an "Article" that I meant to be a complete description of a project, similar to what I might write up for a magazine article, but with more liberties taken for my own convenience. I stopped reviewing my blog entries after I found these:

SMA20 the "article" content is last instead of first

SMA30 Text formatting is a mess (first page second entry)

SMA40 Article and one comment on last page, more formatting oddities

SMA35 Article moved to the end

SMA23 Article fourth entry down

SMA22 Article now last entry

In many places the text formatting is way off, rendering some unreadable. I gave up in frustration.

I, frankly, don't think this is close to production ready. Fixing all this manually is a lot of tedious work. You might be interested to know that these blog entries passed over a million reads months ago.

Best regards,
Geoff Bunza

Chat

Notifications are too loud, and no way to turn them off that I can find. 

That's annoying. 

Update: found a way to kill the sounds. Go into the "Chat" window at the bottom of the page, pull up Options, and uncheck "Play sounds." 

It's an all or nothing thing. 

Update  2: Oh cute.... once turned off - THEY DON"T STAY OFF.

Examples please

Give me some of your worst examples for the developers, please.

At some point here soon, we will have to move and just live with the warts over there. This old site is getting more expensive by the day to maintain. It is reaching the point that we simply cannot afford the life support for this old obsolete software.

One thing that can be a problem on this site is if you try to get fancy with your formatting doing image float with wrapping text. The new site has none of that, thank goodness. Getting fancy with your formatting here gets really goofy if you try to view the post on a smaller screen.

I highly recommend keeping it simple on here with no image float / text wrap complexities. That converts a lot more cleanly.

Examples as requested

Hi Joe,

OK. Try the second entry here:  https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/sma30-a-simplified-wifi-throttle-you-can-customize-12024709

Try first new comment here:  https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/sma40-modeling-with-magnets-working-mu-connections-brake-hoses-structure-mounts-boxes-12031933?&trail=45

All aside from the article entries in the wrong place here:

SMA20 the "article" content is last instead of first

SMA40 Article and one comment on last page

SMA35 Article moved to the end

SMA23 Article fourth entry down

SMA22 Article now last entry

Well, actually, those are things I didn't do. Also as a general comment... there seems to be an explosion of white space in the new forum -- extra blank lines all over the place. Also, why the need to maximize virtually every picture used? It looks like some grade-schooler went nuts slapping a bunch of pictures on the page.

Best regards,
Geoff

Prof, try it again

Yes, we had the AI moderator feature turned on. Noticed if you happen to use trigger words in common use by spammers, you can run afoul of the AI moderator. I hit that same block myself and had no idea what exactly was wrong. I kept rewording my post until it finally went through.

Pretty frustrating, though. For now, I have turned off the AI moderator.

Try your post again ... betchya it goes through this time.

My stuff appears to be all

My stuff appears to be all good as far as I can tell so far but yeah, it seems to have done a number on Geoff and some other folks. Hopefully it can get worked out without too much trouble. It's too bad we didn't already have the likes and rep over here or a way to assign some to start off with because many of us are well liked and have good rep but you wouldn't know it yet on the new forum

GeoffB's stuff

I think the problem may be that he goes back and edits his posts. This appears to change the Date/Time on the post and then... it gets reordered. SMA20 appears to have fallen victim to this. 

More bad examples in the new forum

Hi,

Here are some more issues:

More bad formatting:
SMA26 Bottom of second post
SMA27 BOM at bottom of second post

Article out of place:
SMA22 Article is last
SMA23 Article is #4 on first page not second
SMA17 Article is #5 on first page not second
SMA10 Article is comment 61 not second
SMA5  Article is comment 6 not second
SMA4  Article is comment 19 not second
SMA3  Article is comment 9 not second

Note: I have not gone through all 3400+ posts.

Best regards,
Geoff Bunza

@geoffb

We all start with a zero reputation

At least we all start in the same place as to reputation. It will take liking posts and threads to build that up.

In the meantime, the number of posts you've made does give you a member category and a "ranking" of sorts.

So long as we can reorder and clean up all the errant blank line

… personally, I’m quite prepared to put things in the right order on the new forum, fix formatting, etc. So long as there are features to allow that.  

But the way the developers are moving them across now, I’m with others, pretty unworkable.

If they can’t get it right, I’d almost rather they were not moved at all, and I can cut and paste them over from the old forum, providing it remains accessible for a period of time.

As a 35 year IT guy, I think they are going about this all wrong.  They should take a few examples of “worst case” problem types from previous testing, (Geoff’s, mine, etc.) as examples, and just get the conversion on those working flawlessly first before wasting time on an en-masse conversion.  

They have not really fixed anything from what i can see across three attempts now.

It would help to understand better HOW they are doing this, and to see the source and destination data models involved here.  There are a lot of folks here, yourself included Joe, with a ton of IT experience.  Maybe we can help.

Worked OK

Dear Joe,

Tested OK,

https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/test-from-prof-k-12033510?pid=1329499929

On reflection, I can see a few words which may have tripped an over-zealous AI over,
but I'll wear that, with no malicious intent, these were inadvertent edge cases...
(Hint: what's the inhouse name for Ballard Terminal's SW-1 # 98?)

Happy Modelling,
Aiming to Improve,
Prof Klyzlr