Forum: changes and improvements

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This is a list of the improvements made on this Forum website, make sure to subscribe to this thread! :slight_smile:

  • Ability to mark a thread as “solved”
  • Create polls
  • Able to add an interactive checklist in the posts
  • Able to assign a thread to someone, useful to keep better tracking
  • Emojis imported from the old forum
  • Added own designs for the forum (select in your profile), demo
  • Able to vote topics, actually only enabled in the Howtos->Faq section

Note: This website is based in Discourse, so I will list only the specific things & usages for Elive

3 Likes
2

I just added a "assign" Plugin, this is not meant to replace the BTS website but can allow us to keep a much better trackings, specially useful in combination with the Solved plugin :dance:

This plugin allows us to:

  • assign a thread to someone (only admins can do that)
  • everybody can list the assignations, like in this thread that has an icon to my username that list my assignations
  • we have an extra entry in our User's top bar tab that lists our assigned topics
  • closing a thread removes the assignations

More details:

6

Customized themes (Elive homemade), so now we have:

  • Elive White: based in the default one, white, best standard (and the one to use for screenshots)
  • Elive Dark: based in the dark default one, but with much nicer colors, improved for the eyes
  • Elive Retrowave: An amazing uber-geek design for oldies, not the best for the eyes but the most uber-geek and special

All of them includes the features for header-icon-links & the fix for the emoticon aspect sizes

Demos:

Elive_Screenshot_2018-07-19_01%3A05%3A15__1002x570
Elive_Screenshot_2018-07-19_01%3A05%3A15__1002x5701002×570 52.8 KB

Elive_Screenshot_2018-07-19_01%3A09%3A36__1009x568
Elive_Screenshot_2018-07-19_01%3A09%3A36__1009x5681009×568 46.1 KB

Elive_Screenshot_2018-07-19_01%3A11%3A55__1011x567
Elive_Screenshot_2018-07-19_01%3A11%3A55__1011x5671011×567 49.9 KB

1 Like
7

FAQ section added, icon in the header included, plugin for “vote” posts included and enabled for the Faq category which makes it more useful! :boogie:

8

Forum was down

The cause was the SSL (httpS) certificate not renewing correctly, causing the browser not "allowing" to connect to the website without the certificate up-to-day, this issue will not happen again.

I have also fired one of the unicorn workers :unicorn:, we have only 1 now, this will reduce the RAM consumption in a great value in order to not use the SWAP partition constantly, which is good for the hardware health, we should not notice any performance difference in the forum since unicorns has super-powers, but if you see the forum slower now, let me know it :slight_smile:

Now, it's time to dance again
:furrydance:

3 Likes
9

Upgrades

Now the forum will automatically upgrade once per month to the last version, this will happen every day 1 of the month at 00 time in central-europe time and will take less than 15 minutes to finish (website will be down during that)

Mentions: @yoda

Downtimes

Due to the stability seen in this well made website (unlike wordpress), I have removed the daily backups that had made a daily downtime of the forum during 2 minutes, a backup still made every 5 days from the website itself which will take no downtime :slight_smile:

Emojis

I think that I already posted this before but in any case... the forum has a few emojis added:

:rainbowyay: or: :rainbowyay::rainbowyay::rainbowyay:

:happy: :happy: :happy:

:baffled:

:cheerleader:

:love:

:runaway:

:happybounce:

3 Likes
11

I have created a new Category (with sub-categories) called “Special Versions”, with a few sub-categories like:

  • e16 (for enlightnement 16 desktop)
  • older (for old versions of Elive like Topaz) - suggestions for a better “oldish” name? :thinking:
  • will add more in the future for different special versions of Elive (like an educative-purposes version, for schools or house-learning)

This is an important (structural) change, so if you* have any feedback about that please tell it now :slight_smile:

Mentions: @yoda, @grottem, @stoppy98, @LupusE, @triantares

2 Likes
13

I would use legacy for the older version, since plenty of people are not native English speakers maybe previous (at least in Germany known from the tape decks).

Or a little more fun with oldies or as they say about Debian rusty.
After some time ancient would also be suitable. The youth would call it vintage. The word immemorial sounds too much like immortal, which isn’t the worst idea since Elive should also keep legacy systems alive.

3 Likes
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hum, so many options, yes we need an intuitive one for non-english speakers (in a single word)

maybe legacy is more specific than older? mmh…

the other names can be a little more confusing (not knowing that you are talking about old versions of elive)

but then “older” sounds more correct (like a reference to a “previous” concept),

Special Versions -> older
Special Versions -> previous
Special Versions -> legacy

hum :thinking:

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I have removed an nginx (web server) main layer and now the forum runs itself full from the container

This was needed to avoid expired httpS (secure ssl url) expirations like it happened a few days ago

The forum should work as good as before and you should not see any difference, the only thing that you should notice (if) is that could be a little faster :slight_smile:

Comment here if you need to report anything about it

1 Like
17

The forum has been down for a while, the cause:

HD disk usage almost full

A rebuild of the forum has been needed, and it took a while due to multiple things

I have made a few cleanups, we are at around 70% of disk usage on the 20GB hosting HD

What takes more disk usage? uploads and backups

What we can do to improve?

The upgrade the hosting with more resources is the double of the actual price (from 6 to 12 USD / month), but if anybody has a S3 Amazon acccount aparently can be used for stock the uploads separately (this of course requires some responsability of the maining of that S3 accout, and/or at least having a daily backup system to somewhere else of this data)

these uploads are basically screenshots (images) uploaded, gif ones too.. the problems is that when there's many, and also seems like the forum does "make thumbnails" of them too

with the time, the forum size grows more

a backup of the forum actually takes like 600 MB compressed, so i reduced the number of these backups to 2 and also another one from cli script on the server (1.3 GB)

1 Like
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Maybe we should put up pictures and gifs on a different location?

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yeah, that's the S3 Amazon feature for :), we need that amazon account, but better if someone has it with some free space and so we don't need to pay for an extra service

in any case is not very hurry right now

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forum went out of space again, but those voohdooh docker images has been purged and rebuilded all the forum, seems like now only the 40 % of disk is used (very good improvement!) maybe sometimes I need to purge all the images in order to leave the forum server with some free space

please tell me if theres anything wrong in the forum, we should have it running with everything as expected (threads, images uploaded correctly, etc...) so im going to delete the snapshot backup in 24h if theres no issues with the forum :dance:

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Forum has been slightly upgraded and reconfigured to use less RAM which should improve the overall server of the forum, tell me if you see any issue or slowness

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In E24 when you press PRNTSCRN there's an option to "Share" the image. this uploads it to enlightenment.org server and gives yout he link. it's how i upload my screenshots...maybe once we switch to e2* we could start telling people to do it that way?

1 Like
34

also one more thing...

enlightenment.org-hosted screenshots don't work on this forum, unless you change http:// to https://...its quite annoying but i'm not admin here so i can't fix it even if there is a way to allow http images (this is NOT begging for admin, it's a statement to show you i didn't give up :madness:)

41

Either they did or screenshots expire - all screenshots that were previously shown using that server are gone. :sob:

Wait... Looking at the Enlightenment screenshot site, they're still there. I'm confused.

EDIT: OK, so I figured it out (I think):

Yes, I think they are moderating the images. Some work and others don't.

42

Well anyway, considering EliveStable is configured to send screenshots not to enlightenment.org but to https://main.elivecd.org/ss then I think that we can set it to that once E24 is default, which would be a better option than storing it on this forum (20gb space)...thoughts?

43

Agreed ... that would be best.
I suspect it's fairly trivial to change the URL.