NEW FORUM: Don't Panic! (recover user account)

Hey everyone, this is the new forum. It’s pretty different. It’s using Discourse, which is a new paradigm in forum software. I’ve kept the old phpBB forum saved in a backup just in case, but so far I really like it.

Recovering your old user account

User accounts should be fixed now. Just go to “log in”, enter your old username, and click “forgot my password.” You should get a password reset email and be good to go!

Categories, not forums and sub-forums
With the old forum I never knew what sort of organization to impose and it was really top-down. Here, everything’s in one big central place, and you pick categories to filter what you see. Things are a little messier at the moment than they would normally be because of the import tool I used, but as time goes on it should be way easier to find the topic you’re looking for as well as to start a new one.

Blog integration
I’ve moved the Fortress of Doors blog over to a new platform and integrated it with Discourse, so this forum will be the “comments section” for the new blog, and every time I post a blog post over there it will result in a parallel forum post here. The integration isn’t working right this minute, but as soon as I sort out some DNS black magic it’ll be running smoothly. This will mean I no longer have to decide between “is this worth a blog post, or should it be a forum post instead?”, a dilemma which often results in me just posting nothing instead.

Usability
I really like using discourse. I love being able to type in markdown and see an auto-preview of my post, and I love the sparse visual style that removes all the little extraneous junk that’s all over the place in phpbb that I never use. It also has all these helpful little touches everywhere that I really like, like suggesting similar topics to what you’re posting, etc.

Search
The search is much better.

Log in with anything
I’ve set it up so you can log-in with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Yahoo, and even Github (let me know if there’s issues). And if you’re a grumpy old codger like me, you can still create a site-specific login just for this site like in the old days.

Moderation/Spam
Discourse is supposed to be much easier to manage, moderate, and protect from spam, and we’ll see how that goes. I’ll be elevating trust levels for our old forum veterans, and that should come with some built-in privileges. The idea behind Discourse is that it’s self-moderating community software.

This is one of the biggest reasons for the change. I was never able to keep up with the never-ending fight against spam on the phpbb forum, and I felt every solution was just another bandaid, and the spambots rapidly evolved in a never-ending arms race. We’ll see if Discourse lives up to it’s promises, but I feel they’re at least trying to attack the roots of the spam problem rather than just constantly hack at the branches like phpbb does.

Anyways this is a bit of an experiment but I think it will work out great. In the coming days I’ll also talk about our new bug reporting system, and our roadmap for further development. Please pardon our dust as we sort things out.

Known Issues

• 24 hour gap: The phpbb forum dump I used was about a day old when I disabled the old forum, so if you posted anything since then it’s in limbo and you might want to re-post. Same for any PM’s you sent in the last 24 hours or so.
• Strange order: Because of the import, all the topics grabbed from both the blog and the old forum are in weird random orders, so there’s a bunch of old stuff on the front page. As we start posting things this will gradually sort itself out, and I’ll dig into the administrative tools to see what I can do to clean things up a bit. Update: this should now be fixed.
• Broken links: Also, old links to the interior of the old forum are just redirecting to the base forum domain for now. I’m aware of a possible solution for generating the necessary mappings to redirect the old topics to the new ones, but it’ll be a bit of work and I’m not quite ready to dive down that rabbit hole right this minute. If there’s tons of demand for it I’ll probably do it but if we can live without it I’ll let it slide.
• Lost comments from blog: The old blog and its comments still exist at larsdoucet.blogspot.com for archival purposes, but I haven’t migrated the old comments, so they’re effectively gone from the new blog. After importing the old phpbb comment, I was exhausted and I figure it’s not a huge deal.

Hey, Boots/Sarah here. Had to log in with my Yahoo account because of the account transfer issue that is apparently known already. >.o Anyways, Discourse is REALLY slow on my phone, and I don’t know if what I’m seeing is the desktop site or their mobile site, which is apparently not very mobile-friendly. I’m very confused by this layout, to be honest. I’ll probably be popping in less for now, until I cave and buy some Internet somewhere. -n-; or a mobile-friendly version pops up.

Hey there! Thanks for this feedback. We should have the first glitches sorted this week. Thanks for the comments on mobile performance, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do about that and if others are having the same issue. I’m also going to be improving the organization if I can.

We’re going to try this for a month, and see how it works. If it doesn’t work, we’ll revert to the old format.

Found this post on the main Discourse site:

Are you using an Android device? If so, what mdoel? I’ll talk to them about what the ETA on improvements is.

Old account on new forum works again for me now (received a bunch of password resets ), thanks !

Yep! I’ll be sending out an email blast to let people know how to reset their passwords. I’m also going to be organizing some things for a day or so – a bunch of old posts are cluttering up the front page (mostly blog imports from years ago), that will be fixed soon.

Question – did you get a bunch of emails from any source other than your own actions? (Ie, emails from this forum you didn’t trigger yourself?)

I think it was only the emails from my (repeated… ahem ^^; ) attempts at password recovery.
And one extra when you replied to my post right now, which is normal.

Nothing odd

I will say, I like how the old forum had the TOC-style “home page.” Is there anyway to make that my default rather than having the latest pop up with the categories all mixed up.

Is this what you’re looking for?

http://discourse.leveluplabs.com/categories

Kind of. I made that link where I go to, instead of home.

Maybe it’s just me and the ocd that I deny I have, but it just doesn’t seem right. I like the basic organized look of what I would call a typical forum, like this:

It certainly doesn’t have to look exactly like the old phpbb. Obsidian & Bethesda has the same basic layout that is familiar with a forum structure, but looks different:

Heck, don’t change it just because of me. I still use XP on my main computer because I hate these menus:

I had to do a bunch of customizing just so I could access to what I need. I like organized words for my menu stuff, not basically replacing the menu with just taskbars.

But what I am trying to say is it just feels familiar which gives a level of comfort if you know what I mean. Kind of like how you can’t really sell a car with the rear seats facing backwards. It just doesn’t seem right. Again, maybe it’s just me but it would be nice to know what others think. It’s just kinda strange that Discourse doesn’t naturally follow the basic organized theme of a forum.

EDIT: I liked knowing the top bar was for announcements. Then you had the section for DefQ2, then another for DefQ1, then Off Topic, then Tech Support or something like that. I knew where everything was, and it was in a good order. This just seems a bit too random to me.

Something like this:

I really like the post editor. I’m posting again just because I want to use it some more. I wish more post editors worked this way with preview and editing all at the same time.

I agree with babaganoosh, it seems like a more orderly homepage would be easier to browse. But, if not, I’ll get used to this. (Worth noting though, that one of the things that drove me away from Facebook was the random order posts would come up in. No way to organize or tell where you are. I’m pretty big on spatial persistence though. I guess that’s why I don’t play many PDLs.)

I’ll see if there’s a way to better organize/customize the front page. Right now the only thing I can find is the categories link up top.

What do you all think of the search functionality?

It seems to be a really good one, giving you suggestions after 3 letters. Although my past experiences of being banned and warned for necroing threads on other forums have steered me away from searching on them.

(Hashtag)ForumShellShock

Okay, with Internet now, so I’m back in. Though how are alpha users to find any alpha-stuff? And the like, without categorization/organized layout? Just by googling and hoping they don’t wind up posting stuff that winds up visible to non-alphas?

There is a special tag or category that only certain people can see for now. (If you are logged in and marked as in that group, you should see it. On the main forum page, you should see the recent poll marked that way.) When posting, you can also select that tag; I’m assuming that makes the post not visible to others.

In general on this new forum, you can click on a category to see posts marked under that category.

Pretty much. For Alpha backers and testers (and Beta backers in the future), you can select the “Secret” category from the categories drop down in the upper left.

For now I’m trying to keep most of my talk out in the open, and only pasting protected links to new builds, etc and a minimum of related tester-related chatter in the secret forum so it doesn’t become too much of an insider’s club.

Well, I’ve only just now been able to decipher why I’ve not been able to login, reset my password or receive any password reset emails ever since the migration.

For some reason it holds email addresses to be case sensitive. So ‘Tralala@email.com’ would be invalid, whereas ‘tralala@email.com’ works. It also wouldn’t let me log in with ‘hollow’, even though my forum name was Hollow. Weird.

Welp, hey everybody. What’ve I missed?

Nothing of TOO MUCH importance, actually.