Upcoming Forum Downtime...

There will be a two hour downtime of the Wilders Security Forums starting at 11:00pm EDT (GMT -04:00) on Thursday, July 8, 2004 - a little less than 34 hours from the time stamp on this post.

The purpose of this downtime is to upgrade the primary forum software (vBulletin) and to perform some general maintenance. A downtime message will be put in place of the normal forum index once the downtime has started, and should there be any problems, updates will be posted on that page.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

 

Reminder

This downtime starts in exactly 6 hours (from the time of this reply).

 

Less than 3 hours now.

 

No, not really. Lots of cool stuff if you are into the software behind it all and what happens on the server, but not too much for forum visitors to get excited about. Although they've made a few pieces even faster than they were already. This is basically just a bug-fix release, that bundles in a few security fixes for good measure. It'll probably play out like this.

Some people will find that some odd problem or behavior within the software that they didn't like is suddenly fixed. Some others will find that something that they thought worked great, suddenly doesn't anymore.

It's just the way these things go, I'm afraid. But regardless of what happens, these are the types of upgrades that we must do. Like applying Windows Updates on your PC, we have to stay current here, too.

 

Since you said I could take 4 hours, I took 4 hours.

Good thing you didn't say 8!

 

Yes, so far it looks like mostly improvements. But, there are other differences, too.

For example, they improved (slightly, so no one get your hopes too high ) one thing within the "unread thread" tracking system. You know how when you post a reply to a thread, the forum software positions you looking at your reply after you hit submit... Well, that no longer counts as having "read that thread". If immediately from that position you click to the same sub-forum's index page, that thread shows as unread. (At least that's working for me on IE6.)

In reading about this in their notes, it seems there were cases where people were missing being notified of other new posts in threads they were replying to, while they were replying, so they now err on the side of leaving such a thread un-read until you hit it fresh again. That can be annoying to some, but beneficial to others.

Also, (this one is better), on the previous version if you were clicking through threads and you hit a multi-page thread where you have unread posts split across two pages, you actually have to hit the next page before it marks that thread as read. This is a big improvement as far as I'm concerned...

Often enough I'd be stepping through unread threads in a subforum hitting "Next Thread>>" and I'd hit a multi-page thread... I'd scroll to the bottom of it and for some reason miss the fact that there was a next page at that time. Going on to the next thread and finally hitting the index I'd end up missing that thread's "last page" of posts because have just touched the thread, it marked it as read for me. Now, such threads would still be marked as unread because there was an extra page that was never clicked on, so it never cleared that thread as being completely read.

 

Hmm, don't quote me on this but regarding how that "make a post, but thread remains unread" thing... I had just started a reply in a thread... I typed for a while and finally submitted my reply. Total time maybe 6 minutes. When I hit submit, I was positioned at my post as usual. I went to the sub-forum's index page and saw that thread unread, of course, per the above noted change. When I click on that thread's show me the first unread post icon, it took me to a post made right before my last reply. That post by another person was made after I opened my reply window but before I hit the button to submit my reply. So, the marker was pointing me not to my new post but to the first unread reply above/before my post. Hmm, looks like a good feature after all.