67 replies to this topic

[Anna J]

Dear friends,

We are planning to upgrade our current version of A&F (Invision 2.something) to Invision version 3.0.2 in the next couple weeks. This will help us monitor spammers, customize the board, and do many other things more efficiently.

A&F will go "down" for a few hours when this happens. I'm sorry I cannot pinpoint the exact date and time - it depends on when Invision gets back to us.

See here for more information about the new version.

Thanks for your patience!

[Anna J]

Hello!

You may have noticed everything looks different. We are upgrading to a new version of Invision, and it will be customized with IMAGE/ Arts & Faith logos next week (Wednesday).

Thank you for your patience.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Are the logos the only thing that will change from here on in?

I have to say, the changes to the board -- not just in aesthetics but also in functionality -- are so drastic that they remind me of the Facebook "upgrade" that took place earlier this year, and how I basically ended up abstaining from Facebook entirely for a few months, until I could once again approach it as something completely "new".

[Darrel Manson]

When I edited my film journal, there is a lot of html stuff coming through (with < rather than [ ) It comes up on things that I've italicized and on the star "smilies". Will that be corrected in some way or do I need to go through and clean that up line by line?

[M. Dale Prins]

My opinion on the board change, which is my opinion on all such similar changes, is there is no possible way to decide if I like it or not until I've lived with it for 30 days or so. Call it The Electric Razor Rule.

I will mention that people using avatars from the A&F Top 100 are finding them broken. But you probably already knew that and will probably fix that when you fix the personalization stuff like the logo, etc. on Wednesday.

And good job on (at least for now) slowing down the spammers.

Dale

Edited by M. Dale Prins, 11 October 2009 - 08:32 PM.

[Persona]

Check One Check One Testing One Two Three

Pretty sure the new board doesn't work for me. Either that or the mods finally kicked me off. Jerk weeds.

Either that or

(oh look I'm going to try a thingy here)

Quote

Purpose
This forum contains official communications from the website staff. Website users should read and be familiar with these messages. Replies to announcements in this area may be moderated, meaning that they are queued for administrator review before being published.

I'm probably just under administrator review. Which means free speech has been eradicated. Close the borders close the borders, we are going under marshall law

Edited by Persona, 11 October 2009 - 08:36 PM.

[M. Dale Prins]

Persona, on 11 October 2009 - 08:35 PM, said:

Either that or the mods finally kicked me off.

If only. If only.

Dale

[du Garbandier]

I don't know about the plus/minus, voting on posts feature. That sort of rating of posts always bothers me on other sites and is hard to ignore.

I am going to vote down this post and see what happens.

Well, it doesn't work yet. Let my disapprobation of the post rank feature (except for expressly mischievous purposes) be recorded for future reference.

But everything else looks great.

Edited by du Garbandier, 11 October 2009 - 11:49 PM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Looks like new "quotes" are being formatted properly -- but all the old "quotes" have lost their formatting on this upgrade, just as they did on all the other upgrades.

Also looks like the "first new post" feature has been completely re-set so that the first post, period, in any thread is the first "new" post that you are taken to. That becomes a bit of a problem with the longer threads, in particular.

I agree with du Garbandier that the plus-minus feature is a, er, minus. Then again, if it means we will no longer have entire posts devoted to people saying "Me too." or "Amen." or "What so-and-so said.", then it might be a net plus.

[Persona]

Me too. What Peter said. Amen.

What does the plus sign do anyway?

[M. Dale Prins]

I'm not sure why the quotes lost their formatting, to be honest. The general quote tag (left bracket "quote" right bracket) is the same on both boards, but it looks like in the SQL database (or whatever they use), the old quote tags were replaced with some commented out HTML. That doesn't make sense to me. Not that I'm blaming the folks at Image, though; seems more like an Invision problem.

Dale

Edited by M. Dale Prins, 12 October 2009 - 09:59 AM.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Apparently we can't embed Youtube clips any more. Bummer.

Ideally, if this problem is fixed, we can also add the ability to embed Google Video, Vimeo and Facebook video clips.

[David Smedberg]

Voting on posts seems to have been disabled, simply because each of us has a quota of "0". (I tried to vote stef down, it did not work. Bummer. )

[Anna J]

Thanks for your comments, everyone! This new version IS rather startling. We're hoping to filter spam more effectively, and make things easier on our staff and interns, who don't know anything about Invision.

The plan is to make the new version look and feel as much like the old version as possible. There were a lot of manual overrides and customizations that didn't get rolled over into the new default settings, so we're going to try to get those back at least.

Thanks for mentioning stuff like the post ratings. If I recall correctly, we got rid of that feature manually, and we will need to do that again. The bad HTML, the POST_SNAPBACK, and the Top100 avatars are on our list to look into as well. The video embedding is a bummer, I'll see if we can get that back.

Darrel, can you direct me to your film journal? Is it an Invision blog attached to your profile somehow? Please excuse my ignorance

Note: The board will be down for several hours on Wednesday night the 14th while this is happening. I'll make another announcement on Tuesday night + Wednesday morning to remind everyone.

[Andy Whitman]

Thanks for your ongoing support, Anna. I realize that the nature of this topic is one that will solicit problems/complaints, and I appreciate your willingness to address them. More importantly, I'm thankful for the fact that A&F exists, and that for the most part its existence is seamless and can be taken for granted. I know that doesn't happen by accident, and I'm thankful for the work that makes it possible.

[Peter T Chattaway]

Anna J wrote:
: The video embedding is a bummer, I'll see if we can get that back.

Yay! Oh, and when I said "Facebook video", I meant "Flickr video". I get my online F-sites mixed up all the time.

[Crow]

Darrel Manson, on 11 October 2009 - 08:24 PM, said:

When I edited my film journal, there is a lot of html stuff coming through (with < rather than [ ) It comes up on things that I've italicized and on the star "smilies". Will that be corrected in some way or do I need to go through and clean that up line by line?

I had the same problem. It looks like the html codes from the old board were of the form <b>, while on the upgraded board the codes are in brackets, [b]. I redid my journal by copying it to a Word doc, doing a global replace on changing the <> tags to [], deleting the extra HTML code and reentering the ratings, and coping it back to the board.

OK, I'm a coding geek, I'll admit it.

[Darrel Manson]

Anna J, on 12 October 2009 - 12:50 PM, said:

Darrel, can you direct me to your film journal? Is it an Invision blog attached to your profile somehow? Please excuse my ignorance

http://ArtsAndFaith....ndpost&p=190312

It's in the pinned "2009 Film Journals" of >Film Awards, Festivals and Lists

[Persona]

Darrel Manson, on 11 October 2009 - 08:24 PM, said:

When I edited my film journal, there is a lot of html stuff coming through (with < rather than [ ) It comes up on things that I've italicized and on the star "smilies". Will that be corrected in some way or do I need to go through and clean that up line by line?

Ooh, yeah, that really does look bizarre. This is a very important section to some of us -- we can go back six years or so and remember on what day we saw a particular film, which also helps with memory issues in general. (Wife: "Don't you remember when we," blah blah blah? Me (thinking): "Oh, yeah, that was the same day I saw blah blah blah blah, I remember exactly how that was!" Or something like that.)

I am afraid to edit my journal for now. I think I will hold off for a little bit, and see if a good deal of work is going to need to be done when I do choose to edit. At least that way I'll be a bit prepared.

[Persona]

I remember in the old days when we changed boards that if something looked goofy, a lot of times we'd just go back and hit edit and then save changes... Ouch, I decided just to try it with a simple post in the films illiteracy thread and got this:

<!--quoteo(post=205497:date=Oct 8 2009, 09:23 AM:name=BethR)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (BethR @ Oct 8 2009, 09:23 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=205497"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div> <div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->(with the exception of <i>Fight Club</i> from 2004).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
IMDB lists <i>Fight Club</i> as 1999. I just did my Tops of 2000-2010 list and it wasn't on there. You gave me a scare. <img src="http://ArtsAndFaith.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

Looks like I threw up on it.

Edited by Persona, 16 October 2009 - 07:59 AM.