Hi, everyone. I just want to let you all know that we will be updating the forum software this weekend some time (probably Saturday). This is a pretty major update, so there will probably be at least a few hours of downtime. Also, because this is such a significant update, we'll be losing a lot of our addons and all of our themes (they haven't been updated for the newer XenForo versions). These are just some things off the top of my head that will be changing:
If you're wondering why we're doing this when it's apparently so much of a hassle, it's because support for the version of XenForo that we're using ends on May 31. That means we will be receiving no more updates to the forum software or probably any addons, really. Stuff tends to break on the forum and need updating from time to time, so I just kinda want to stay ahead of it. I know I've said previously that I wasn't intending to do this update until at least a few months from now, but honestly I just want to get it over and done with, and out of the way. I've been spending too much time fine-tuning things and making themes and stuff, and I would much rather be doing that on a live forum than doing it all on a test forum, just to have to do it all over again.
So, yeah. Shooting for this weekend, I think. Probably during the day because I don't want to be up all night messing with this stuff. I'll try to keep downtime as minimal as possible, but expect at least a couple hours where you won't be able to access the forum at all.
If you have any questions about how this is going to go, or what may or may not be staying, feel free to ask here.
Thank you, everybody.
- All new forum themes. I found light and dark themes that I've been able to modify to look very similar to some of our current themes, so the forum should still look at least somewhat familiar. But that's just the two Scratch themes and Quark. Unfortunately, we don't have replacements for Delta Dark, Baisik, or Anti-Quark. We can look at adding more themes later, though. This is just to get started with.
- The arcade, sadly, is out. The addon that we use for the arcade was abandoned by the developer in like 2014 or something, and AFAIK an alternative has never been released by anyone else.
- I haven't settled on a new Keyword Alert addon yet, so we probably won't have one right away. I'm not sure if existing keyword alerts will be retained when we do get a new addon, but I wouldn't count on it.
- Bookmarks will probably be lost. The newer XenForo versions have bookmarks built in (we've been using an addon for them on here), so we're just going to switch to that. If you have any bookmarks saved that you would like to keep, maybe make a note of them so they can be re-added after we update.
- Many of our addons don't have updates for the new XenForo, so I've had to try to find alternatives that do similar things, but maybe in different ways. There are a few that I haven't been able to find replacements for at all yet. So be prepared for things to be a little different.
If you're wondering why we're doing this when it's apparently so much of a hassle, it's because support for the version of XenForo that we're using ends on May 31. That means we will be receiving no more updates to the forum software or probably any addons, really. Stuff tends to break on the forum and need updating from time to time, so I just kinda want to stay ahead of it. I know I've said previously that I wasn't intending to do this update until at least a few months from now, but honestly I just want to get it over and done with, and out of the way. I've been spending too much time fine-tuning things and making themes and stuff, and I would much rather be doing that on a live forum than doing it all on a test forum, just to have to do it all over again.
So, yeah. Shooting for this weekend, I think. Probably during the day because I don't want to be up all night messing with this stuff. I'll try to keep downtime as minimal as possible, but expect at least a couple hours where you won't be able to access the forum at all.
If you have any questions about how this is going to go, or what may or may not be staying, feel free to ask here.
Thank you, everybody.
Thanks for taking care of all of us! :heart: