EHM The Blue Line

The forum upgrade has been successful and we're back up and running!

Thanks to some fairly extensive planning, the upgrade process started at 9.45am (UTC / British Time) and went very smoothly indeed - it only took roughly 3 hours 15 minutes to complete (and I even found time to keep posting updates at http://www.ehmtheblueline.com/upgrade.html). There are still a some tasks I need to carry out and I'll try and do these later today. This includes the following:

• Finalising the forum settings and checking/updating user/moderator permissions
• Checking that all of our new portal/news pages are working (see the top row of links in the header - i.e. Home Page / Challenge Centre / Dabo Hockey Manager / etc)
• Getting the blogs back online
• Getting some of the essential downloads back online
• Correcting everybody's trophies (and updating the TBL Points to reflect the number of tropies won)

When I have some time later this weekend, I'll post a few more details regarding the new site, etc. I'll also be starting a feedback thread so you can post your views/comments/etc (I'd be especially interested in what you think of the header as I'm not 100% happy with it and am considering redesigning it).

In the meantime, enjoy the new forums!

Lookin good!

Good job! I like the header it gives a vintage look! Hope the search option works better then before...

good job, i think i am gonna like it this way even more

King_Louis wrote:Good job! I like the header it gives a vintage look! Hope the search option works better then before...

It should do. The forum is rebuilding its search index (you have to do this if you upgrade from an older version) right as we speak and should be finished within the next 30 mins. Once the index has been rebuilt, the search function will be up and running.

yep tryied it and it works i like that it gives you a brief description kind of a google way... Maybe you've heard it a hundred times but i think you guys should let people create more topics i know some are obviously not searching for anything but when it comes to big issues like prospects in exemple, well there's like a thousand posts, a hundred pages and if the answer is at page 50 then you're f*****. Sure you'll learn a lot on EHM reading randomly at the posts while making your way but there's a good chances you'll end up asking the same question at the end of the tread. Now if the search engine is more powerful and scan the posts and replies rather then the topic titles this would'nt be an issue. My opinion but i'm ain't running and i respect your work and the way you want it to be 'cause overall its a great forum with a real nice community...

if i click downloads, i get "You are not authorised to read this forum."

King_Louis wrote:Now if the search engine is more powerful and scan the posts and replies rather then the topic titles this would'nt be an issue.

I have to agree, I wasn't too big of a fan of the topic title searches. They often didn't return any results; you were bette roff going to the advanced search, and telling it to look in message text.

But it looks like the search looks in posts. I did one just a few minutes ago to find Tasku's link to the Hearts of Iron III patch, and it returned all posts with "Hearts of Iron", which included the post I needed.

Just to let everybody know that the Blogs are now back online. You can access it via the link in the header or by following this link: http://www.ehmtheblueline.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=90

King_Louis wrote:yep tryied it and it works i like that it gives you a brief description kind of a google way... Maybe you've heard it a hundred times but i think you guys should let people create more topics i know some are obviously not searching for anything but when it comes to big issues like prospects in exemple, well there's like a thousand posts, a hundred pages and if the answer is at page 50 then you're f*****. Sure you'll learn a lot on EHM reading randomly at the posts while making your way but there's a good chances you'll end up asking the same question at the end of the tread. Now if the search engine is more powerful and scan the posts and replies rather then the topic titles this would'nt be an issue. My opinion but i'm ain't running and i respect your work and the way you want it to be 'cause overall its a great forum with a real nice community...

I appreciate your constructive criticism. I can see where you're coming from with regards to keeping the same subject in one thread where there are pages of replies. It's something we've considered before, but we feel that on the balance, that it'd be better to enforce this rule than to allow numerous new threads asking the same question over and over again. It dilutes the forum listing, making it difficult to find other threads. In addition, it means users/mods are having to repeat their answers over and over again. I agree it's not ideal but I think it's probably the best solution at the moment. I'm always open to suggestions on how things can be improved though.

Just to clarify: Regardless of whether the same question is asked in the same thread or in a new one, you're still going to get the same results when performing a forum search.

fireholder wrote:if i click downloads, i get "You are not authorised to read this forum."

As mentioned in the first post, I am working on getting the downloads back online. It's going to take some time but, as I said, I'll be prioritising the most important (i.e. rosters, patches and demos).

Great job Archi this is awesome! I'm a little bit loss with the new texture and eveything but this is some nice change. Congrats. *Smiley who applauded*

[quote="archibalduk"]
As mentioned in the first post, I am working on getting the downloads back online. It's going to take some time but, as I said, I'll be prioritising the most important (i.e. rosters, patches and demos).[/quote]

okay that's cool. i just thought it could have been a usergroup authorization/access mask issue, which is why i mentioned it :)

EHM 2007 roster updates are back online: http://www.ehmtheblueline.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=77

Good job, looks great.

great job arch! looks awesome!

Nice! :)

Looks great arch! :) thanks to to whole TBL crew who keep my fav site running :)
smilies don't seem to be working tho :(

n1 very nice :)

Great Job Arch!!!! Love the new look!!

CeeBee wrote:smilies don't seem to be working tho

When I looked at your message details I could see that you'd ticked the options to disable BBCode and smilies. I'm guessing you didn't tick these yourself but they must have defaulted to that. Let me look into it.

I checked and they are still enabled in my profile but now that I'm posting I see them again.

Maybe I'm blind Archi but there isn't any edit button anymore???

It looks GREAT! During the first exploring I got lost several times. But now I'm feeling like home again
And it is definitelly faster than previous version (at least in IE7)

Congrats on the smooth upgrade! I was so happy to return from the weekend to see that TBL was in fact up with the new site upgrade.

I love the new look! Great work, Archi!

philou21 wrote:Maybe I'm blind Archi but there isn't any edit button anymore???

I've disabled the edit feature for all forums other than the blogs forum. In the past we had a time limit whereby users could edit their post within 15 minutes of editing it. However, in order to allow unlimited editing in the blogs, I had to remove editing from the other forums.

The reason for the 15 minute limit was allow users to correct any mistakes in their posts without leaving the edit open for abuse. In the past (when we allowed unlimited editing) we had a couple of instances where the edit feature was abused (and it's something I've seen occur on one or two other forums). Hence I have disabled the feature. However, if there is great demand for the edit feature then I'm happy to enable it in all forums. I'd love to hear what other users think about this.

That doesn't bother me that much Archi. I'm just gonna watch carefully my posts before posting them. Anyway there's the delete option.