Website and Forum Migration and a Question

General GTG General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,

I’m Joel, the web monkey overseeing the re-development and migration of the Greater Than Games / Sentinels of the Multiverse website. The site is coming along nicely and we hope that you will enjoy the look and feel of the new site as much as we do.

We are planning to start the migration on Saturday August 11th and the new site will come back online sometime after that. This means that on the morning of August 11th, we will take the Forums offline to begin their migration. This is a multiple-step operation and will take us (me) at least a couple of hours to export, import, export again, import one more time (really, I’m not kidding here), and do a whole bunch of testing before the Forums finally appear in Drupal.

The features that we are sure to move are the forums and posts (of course), user accounts, private messages, badges, avatars and attachments. (Avatars and Attachments may come at a later date as they are the most challenging) I think that your passwords will be brought over, too, but we’ll have to see after the move. If passwords are not converted, we will provide detailed instructions on how to initiate a reset. (In the meantime, please be sure your email address is correct in your Account Settings.)

We are still investigating maintaining of the features that you currently have, such as “Notify me of Replies”, and such enhancements may continue to appear after the site is switched.

So now that we have that out of the way, I have a question for you, the users of the forum:

When it comes to composing posts and replies, do you prefer using the BBCode technique for styling your posts (e.g. using the square bracket codes to make [bold] or [italic] or similar) or would you prefer a real WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor that shows you what your post will look like as you are composing it?

Are there other things you wish you had when composing a post? (Ok, I know this is two questions…)

Thanks!
–Joel

2

I wouldn’t mind either, but I would prefer WYSIWYG. Thanks for all of the work you’re doing for the forum members and >G!

3

I will cautiously say WYSIWIG, because my experience of WYSIWIG web-based editors is that they work up until a point and then they fail and if you can’t get to the underlying raw text, you’re stuck.

Good luck!

4

Thanks for all your work! I would prefer the WYSIWYG!

5

Greatly looking forward to the change over, Joel!

On your question, I personally have no preference - years of working on forums have made the code habit - but I think WYSIWYG will be better for the site, as it’s just easier for folks to use.

Quick question: Will we have the ability to use some kind of spoiler tag?

6

My vote is WYSIWYG too, although it’d be nice to be able to switch to editing the code itself when the WYSIWYG editor has misinterpreted its human masters (which happens more often than you’d like).

7

I prefer the BB code, I have had problems with WYSIWYG editors in the past but so long as I retain the ability to edit my posts once I have submitted them and can correct my hideous errors either if fine.

And Hello website guy, it seems odd to be welcoming you to the forums you deal with but welcome!

8

People, people. Didn’t you notice that they said the forums will be down for a few hours? Am I the only one who is going to go mad without my every thirty minute dose of foruming? (Just kidding by the way)

I don’t really prefer either BB code or WYSIWYG, since I don’t do too much boldng and what not.

9

I’m really fine either WYSIWYG or BB. I think I prefer BBCode personally, but I’m weird like that. Would it be possible for us to use both? Switching back and forth would be good. If that’s possible, then WYSIWYG by default would be better.

10

I build the BBCodes into my strategy guides when I’m writing them on Word if I need something bolded or italicized. How would that change if we go the WYSIWYG way?

11

After looking over your responses, there’s a preference for WYSIWYG, but I think what I will try to do is allow for a choice between BBCode or WYSIWYG. In the WYSIWYG mode, you will always be able to swap between the HTML view and the WYSIWYG view.

There is a possibility that the BBCode will be simpler or a reduced set of functions that we have now. I am still investigating what is possible using the BBCode module we have available to us.

Let’s see how it goes. :slight_smile:

Thanks!

12

What do you mean by “Spoiler Tag”? (I don’t get the reference)

13

A tag you can wrap some text in so that it won’t be immediately visible. People who want to read the spoiler can highlight it or do something to make it visible.

14

Here’s a sample of a spoiler tag from a site I’ve frequented in the past.

15

The only thing I would like is the notification’s fixed. I never get emails for notifications or password resets. I have made sure the options are active, and I put this site on the accepted contact list,

16

Less than 24 hours! Are you ready? (I’m not ready! goes back to working furiously on the website)

17

I am ready! But I just need to sit here and press F5 repeatedly until the site comes back up, probably a tad bit easier than what you guys have to do.

18

Did it go down and come back up already and I missed it?

19

Oh, DEFINITELY not. You’ll know when it happens. What with the website looking ENTIRELY different. And probably needing to make the system reset your password.

We’re going to be doing it tomorrow, mid-day. We set it for Saturday so we could push it back a day if we ran into issues, and the store module gave us more trouble than we originally anticipated. No worries, though! Still only a few hours away, in the grand scheme of things!

20

I didn’t think so… but I didn’t think that many heroes would skip their turns!