Forum Maintenance Announcements

[number6]

Forum maintenance completed earlier, here is what has happened:

Forum software has been upgraded with new version from vendor.

Public facing items fixed:
* JQuery upgrade/updated
* Resolved an issue where Articles were sorted by the last comment date and not published date.
* Renamed the Activity Stream module on the default Home Page to Forum Home module. This better reflects its purpose.
* Updated node parsing to prevent extraneous JSON from appearing after attachment deletion.
* Resolved an issue where Code, BBCode can have an improper height.
* Resolved an issue that prevented pagination on the Members List when using a non-English language.
* Resolved an issue that could show incorrect content based on caching and the use of is_member_of() based conditionals.

I've tested email notifications, posting new threads, replying to existing threads, Blog posts, browsing, uploading attachments of various types, inclusion of youtube links for video play.
I've not found new problems since the upgrade.
If you find problem, reply here. If you can't reply here, try emailing: defconforums@gmail.com
Thanks!

[number6]

Hello,
Sorry about the down time.

The forums have been down from 9:55pm pacific time on June 17 until noon June 18.

We completed a test of the forum OS upgrade on a VM and found problems, then resolved them, reset to snapshot to confirm the process worked, but the VM was not a perfect match to what we have in production. When we upgraded the OS on the production server, the upgrade broke PHP and its ability to run our forum software. We had to switch over to building PHP from source. We are now running our own PHP build and the forums appear to be working.

Please report any problems you see with forums since this upgrade.

Things I have tested and found working:
* The forums can send email
* CAPTCHA images are still displayed
* I can post and reply to posts
* PM appear to work

If you find otherwise, please let us know!

[number6]

Hello everyone,

After a major upgrade of the OS, PHP stopped working with the forums, and we have to move to building from source.

Testing on a VM did not expose this problem.

Now, the forums are "up" but in degraded state.

EXISTING users should be able to login and read posts but may not be able to send PM or add posts/replies, but NEW users can't sign up until I resolve an issue with email messages from forums working from PHP without failing.

There may also be issues with the image processing libraries, which may break upload of images, and the Captcha for user signup.

Without email, you won't get notifications of replies to your posts, or threads, either.

Sorry about the bad news and loss of service.

I need to take a nap, and get back to this later this afternoon.

[number6]

Forums have been upgraded.

Please report any problems as comments to this post.

If you are unable to post, use the "contact us" link to send us an email.

NEW: OS was upgraded. We tested this on a VM before trying in production. New upgrade broke PHP being able to serve forum software.
Now forums are running in s a degraded state:
* No Email from forums: so no new user signup, and no email notice on replies to posts
* Ability to post replies or send PM are mostly broken, and will likely result in a "gateway error"

I need a nap. I will resume work on the forums later this afternoon.

[Dark Tangent]

Forums have been updated! New features and fixes:

Blogs
The grid view has been added to the Blog Listing. This works similarly to the grid view on Groups. In addition to this, sorting functionality has been added to the Blog Listing.

The display of notices in the page header has been improved. The Notifications link is now a drop-down menu that lists the number of each type of notification. This list will also include Reported/Flagged and Unapproved posts for moderation purposes. When the user also has vBulletin Messenger active, this list will update automatically between page loads.


JavaScript
Several JavaScript files have been extensively refactored in order to provide updated and more concise code. During the refactor, deprecated code may have been removed. If you experience issues after installing this version, you should refresh the browser cache to make sure that all files are updated properly. If the issues persist, please let us know by filing a bug report.

Additional Resolved Issues

• Pagination for Social Group member lists have been fixed.
• Users can now select multiple emoji in the editor without having to reopen the panel for each one.
• The online/offline status icon has returned to the post bit.
• Resolved an issue that could cause publish dates on edited articles to advance by one month.
• Resolved an issue that prevented the merging of Photo Gallery posts.
• Improved date handling for non-English languages.
• The system now shows a proper error page if the user doesn't have permission to download an attachment.
• Private and Invisible Channels will no longer be displayed in search results. Private channels are channels the user does not have permission to view. Invisible Channels are those with a display order of 0.
• An option was added to the search module in order to filter Unapproved Posts from the results.
• The layout of all Message Center pages has been updated so they work better in Responsive mode.
• Resolved an issue so vBulletin Cloud administrators should no longer receive "Invalid Node ID" when accessing the Page Manager within Site Builder.
• Improved caching of phrases within local storage.

[number6]

A bug was reported on creation of events which was broken as a result of security headers directing browsers to block xml communications between clients that support it and the server. DIagnosed, and fixed the header. This lead to another bug where event calendar for selecting a date had CSS issues making the font color close to the same as the background color, making it mostly unusable. This was also fixed. A few other security issues have been fixed.

A new item: we configure forums to host all javascript from the forums itself to avoid metadata data mining by google and facebook. Even with this, the "Facebook Like" image/link appears to include a request for clients to download JavaScript from facebook.com .
The good news is Jeff publishes headers to direct browsers to only download Javascript referenced by forums to client from forums and not from facebook, so most browsers may show an "error" when the browser has the debugger enabled and the facebook image/link appears near a post or thread, but failure in browsers to load that JavaScript and run it does not appear to break anything on the forums.

Please let us know if you see other issues with the forums.

Thanks!

[number6]

Comment here.

[number6]

Forum maintenance completed.
Running through some basic tests to see if I can find anything broken.
Please let us know of any issues you find.
Expecting to return to service at 9pm pacific time.

[number6]

Another issue after it was reported: in Some Chrome and all Chromium I tested, the "preview" button for a post did nothing, and the color of the text in box you type your replies contained black text on dark gray background. Both of these appear to be fixed. Please let me know if you see any other issues.

[number6]

One of the recent header changed broke login. Ooops! Sorry about that.
(Existing logins continued to work fine.)
Changed headers to be less restrictive and allow login to work.
Please let us know if you see issues with new headers.
Thanks!

[number6]

Some forum headers have been altered, or displaced.
We have tested many forum functions which still seem to work.
If you encounter a forum function which seems broken, please let us know!

[number6]

Changes made to web server configuration, which may cause problems , even though we have not found any.
Changes have been made to styles for forums which should only impact moderator and admin content and not break other content, and more.
If you encounter problems, please let us know here, or if you can't post, email us at forum@defcon.org and only if that email is broken, then as a last resort, email defconforums@gmail.com

[Dark Tangent]

Heads up!

I am experimenting with the way we display the header art at the top of forums, so there will be a few random changes as it gets worked out.

I am trying to configure so each area in forums, like groups or election security, can have a more custom feel by having their own art.

This is on the road to a redesign of how defcongroups.org and the forums tie together.

[number6]

Forum maintenance completed. Upgraded to a new version. Many bugs fixed. Most significant feature with upgrade is better support for UTF8.

[number6]

Forum Maintenance again tonight, starting around 6pm pacific time.
Best estimate for down-time is less than 2 hours, but because unpredictable problems are unpredictable, it may take longer.
Thanks!