***IMPORTANT*** Forum Upgrade Imminent - This week !!!

[HarryMann]

To all users and guests


Why upgrade?
The Admin team have been working behind the scenes to prepare for an Upgrade of the forum software from phpBB2 to phpBB3 as BB2 will not be supported from the New Year

There will be other benefits, to both Users and Moderators includinga completely new look and feel and a degree of integration with the club 80-90 website (a work in progress)

Forum search facility will be improved.

Casualties:

Unfortunately , there are so many different Web Browsers around, we cannot support them all, and one casualty will be Internet Explorer 6 support.

The new forum will work best using Firefox but IE7 is OK, and the minimum resolution to render the interface completely will be 1024 width.

Another casualty will be The Garage, but a temporary one, it will of course remain as Read Only in the Old forum for the time being...

The current forum is extremely large! The Gen Chat forum will be significantly pruned down. So if you have posts that you consider vital to retain, bump them now... (GC should not anyway contain Tech, important club business (MO) or For sale, Wanteds etc)

User actions that may be required:

Avatars might need re-linking
Images in some old posts might need editing to remove resize characters in the image tags (further info wil be given after the upgrade*)

*There may be a temporary forum created for upgrade FAQ and user issues

What is going to happen from my (user) perspective ?

When the upgrade is completed the old forum will still be available for viewing but not for posting.

We will put a link to the New forum on the front page of the Old forum, plus Club website menu will have a link to the new forum.

The Old forum will be taken down one night soon, at around midnight, by locking all forums except General Chat, so when you see a message in the Header Panel 'Forums Being Upgraded, GC Only), please do not post anything important in there (e.g. Tech stuff, For Sale etc)

This is quite a big operation, so whilst we have estimated the time to complete at around 24 hours, we may beat this estimate or indeed, require longer.... please bear with us.

When This Friday (5th Dec) the process will start circa 10 p.m.

NB. The club website is also being improved, as mentioned above, so again, this may be unavailable from time to time in the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading and not asking too many questions...
We aim to create the minimum of interference to normal service

Admins

[1664]

*There may be a temporary forum created for upgrade FAQ and user issues

That's a good idea. I know I'm running on IE6. I know this 'cos my computer asked me if I wanted to upgrade to IE7 this morning and I told it to bog off....

[lloyd]

Thanks Admin.

You know where I am if I can be of assistance.

[Iceworx]

Good Luck with the phpBB3 Upgrade


The new control panel is very a*** about face compared to phpBB2

[HarryMann]

The new control panel is very a*** about face compared to phpBB2

Yes , but seems to offer better facilities in some respects.

[HarryMann]

IE6 will work but the display will be....

'ER, godawful!'

[tonytech]

Once again, thanks to the people pulling the strings, winding the springs and clunking the clinkerwatsit.

Dont forget to stock up on midnight oil and Good luck with the changeover.
T

[Iceworx]

The new control panel is very a*** about face compared to phpBB2

Yes , but seems to offer better facilities in some respects.

I fully agree

But you'll have some fun setting the permissions on rooms etc

the Copy feature on rooms will save you hours of messing though

[jaylo264]

thank god we`ve got super beings like you lot to sort it out for us , it really is doudblebluddy dutch to me .
ta
jaylo

[ginge]

well its easy to download firefox and it all sounds ok

[HarryMann]

Yes ginge, thanks, anyone can keep their IE6 (interpret that howsoever you wilt!) and download Firefox, and then decide which one they use 'by default'

I still have IE6 and use it occasionally for development, but Firefox is now my default. You could even just use Firefox for browsing this forum and IE for anything else, but bet you'll soon change that behaviour...

Basically IE6 cannot handle some of the CSS stylesheet calls and makes a mess of the display layout... but the new forum will still work.

[hairyuk]

just a suggestion but if your going to download fire fox it might be worth looking at flock instead it's run on the firefox engine so does everything firefox does but there's more features i've been using firefox for a while now and recently upgraded to flock and find it much better

[Willoughby]

IMHO flock is only for the social network junkies, if ur not in to facebook then there is just too much clutter.

Flock may come with more as standard but it has nothing like the amount of features written for firefox.
Good thing is most of the firefox add-ons will run on Flock. I only install the apps I want keeps the security risk down.

K

[syncroandy]

I would urge the 'Admins' to be conservative in choices they make about the new version.

No doubt it will have all sorts of bells and whistles, and fancy user interface features, and there may be a temptation to turn as many as possible on. DON'T DO IT !

The forum is used by all sorts of people, on all sorts of computers. We don't all have the latest processors, massive TFT screens and 24MB broadband.

Please keep it simple..

Thanks.

[Simon Baxter]

To all users and guests

NB. The club website is also being improved, as mentioned above, so again, this may be unavailable from time to time in the next few weeks.

Admins

'Bout f**kin time, it's a disgrace!