Forum downtime/upgrade

[Lizzian 46]

Hi all.
 
On Saturday the 19th of November (roughly a week from this post) at approx. 1900 (GMT0) the forums will be undergoing maintenance and upgrades. The whole process should only take a maximum of 2 hours to complete and the forums will be completely unavailable during the process of the migration. (The forums will be in offline mode from 1845 in preparation for the migration of the data. As soon as I have finished moving the data and setting stuff up I will change the IP endpoint and bring them back online.)
 
The forums will be moving to a new server as I am retiring the old server that is powering these forums. We will also be taking this opportunity to upgrade the forum software itself, while most things will stay the same there will be differences, below are some of the differences so far:
 
 
 
Q&A/Support:
 
The current system for the support section (where an answer is marked by either a staff member or the original poster) will be changing to something similar to Q&A support sites like Stack Overflow (where a question is asked and any responses to it are potential answers) where the best answer is chosen either by the OP or most votes.
 
IRC Webchat Page:
 
We did not renew the module that allows us to provide in-forum non-topic pages that only the Web-chat IRC client uses. Instead this will be replaced with a link to a Forum thread that contains a link to the web-chat and information on how to join with a desktop-based client.
 
IMPORTANT: User logins:
With IPS4 the way login IDs (what you use to log into the site with) and Display Names (What you see to the left of a users profile) work has changed a fair bit. You will now use your Display Name to log in, not your old login ID (should they be different).
If you have issues logging in after the migration is complete, please contact me on IRC (Lizzy @ irc.esper.net in #OC) and I'll look into any issues with your account.
 
Images from http-based URLs:
Another new feature that comes with the upgrade is the ability for the forums to automatically detect when you post a link to an image using HTTP (for instance, an Imgur URL) and then pull a local copy of that image to the forum's site directory and serve it over HTTPS. This does 2 things: It should help get rid of the mixed content warnings and if you use a hoster that removes images after a certain time they wont be affected. Note: Pre-existing links will not be automatically pulled and HTTPS links wont be pulled regardless.
 
Friends system:
Adding other users as friends is no-longer a thing, instead you 'follow' a user which is a similar concept (friends will be converted to followers during the upgrade).
 
Fluid width:
Not that big of a change, but the forums will be able to dynamically expand to the full width of your browser.
 
Should you have any questions feel free to ask them as replies to this topic and I shall answer them as best as I can (please keep them related to this upgrade, other questions can be asked in the usual places). General feedback or feature ideas for the forum is also appreciated: Post them here https://oc.cil.li/index.php?/forum/19-website/

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