Well, I've upgraded the forum software to the latest version, and completely rebuilt the portal to integrate with mediawiki. Hopefully this will bring more people to participate in the wiki system.

Because of this change, I've decided that it might be best to rethink the wiki layout rather than simply copying all the old content back over verbatim. I'm hoping that I can get enough users interested to where we can start a serious discussion about this -- I'm certainly open to ideas.

Obviously, it's going to take a bit of time to iron out possible bugs and other issues with the new setup, so please be patient. Right now, the layout on the portal is very sparse. I will either reskin it soon, or possibly host a skin design contest if there is enough interest (i.e., post here if you care!).

I believe that most of the major forum functionality has been copied over from the old version too, with the exception of the RSS stuff which I will get to shortly. Also, the active topics section on the new portal is not quite active yet () I should have it up by tomorrow though. However, if you notice something, feel free to post to this thread.

One other thing, all users have been reset to the ad skin temporarily during migration. I will have contributing members moved off this asap tomorrow.

That's about it for now. Look for more posts from myself and other members of the HA staff in the coming days as we work on ideas to move things forward with the wiki.

And by the way, I would like to thank kode54, CiTay, Peter, dev0, and rpop, who all helped out with this migration.

So, known issues to fix:

1. Active topics rendering
2. Proper skins for user groups
3. Smilie rendering under portal
4. Portal caches sometimes when it shouldn't (you can override this by creating a wiki account and setting your prefs to never cache).
5. Portal doesn't use forum database for user accounts (I probably won't fix this)
6. RSS Feeds.
7. Active topics page sometimes showing the wrong topics.

Rendering problems:
http://kotisivu.mtv3.fi/ware.purkki/New-1.jpg

Forum topic listings only show time and no date.

ps thanks for the hard work that goes into maintaining this site.

Heads up!
This is the best initiative made IMO, very nice step forward for the HydrogenAudio community.

I would love to see a skin contest for HA as this would hopefully yield in a new fitting look of our beloved community, so please people - participate!

I have exactly the same problem under IE6, although the rest of the site seems to be fine.

The new portal page doesn't render correctly in opera, too.

Indeed. A skin contest would be wonderfull , I remenber the logo contest we had a lot of entries and interest. Let's make this skin contest official

from the main page, i can't log in as kwanbis, so i created this kwnbs account, but now from inside, it looks like i'm logged .... :|

Would the skinning contest be just for that main portal or the forums as a whole? If it's just a design for the portal I assume that the same colours etc would be required for the portal as is currently used for the rest of the forums.

If it's to be the whole site, woooah, that's some hefty task.

Probably just the portal. I'm not necessarily against the thought of someone creating a skin for the entire site, but yeah... that'd be a lot of work. It'd also be a lot of work to maintain

how do i get active fb2k topics for the last week, instead of today only?

Not quite sure I understand...

I don't think that this functionality is exposed through the intereface right now. I might add something for it later though.

About the rendering problems with IE, I'll try to get them fixed. Right now, I don't even have a windows box to test with though.

He means that he created an account for the wiki.

kwanbis: the wiki system is seprate from the forum.

a possibly very minor error:
the portal only shows 6 replies for this thread, although there are quite a few more.


edit: after clearing cache etc (firefox), the true comment number shows up...

at the main page, it shows i'm logged as "kwnbs", and once i get into the forums, i'm logged as kwanbis. also, the main page does not knows about kwanbis, so i created the kwnbs account to posr asking for a fix, but once inside this topic, i so i was logged as kwanbis.

so the main page uses the wiki user, and not the forum user?

Yup.

It's not really that clear that you're logging into the wiki though.

well.. the portal page is a bit of a mess right now, thanks to broken browsers that can't figure out how to render webpages properly.... sigh.

Anyway, I'm working on fixing things, but I probably have to rewrite a lot of the css to get it to display properly in IE now...

Not wishing to add to your troubles, there seem to be rendering problems in the title / adverts section of the main page. 2 examples of the screen I am faced with are this and that..

This is in firefox by the way, I would hope the broken browser argument doesn't apply

What you are seeing is the result of me trying to get things working in IE first rather than doing it "the right way." Naturally, this means that sane browsers will have problems in the meantime.

Sorry.

Ok.. I think things are better in IE now. Maybe an opera user can comment too.

The logo is squeezed on the left. And there's this huge white space at the header.

http://pessoal.onda.com.br/rjamorim/opera.png

Kill the cache and that should be fixed. The white space is where the google ads are that were removed by whatever you're running.

I'm not running anything

http://pessoal.onda.com.br/rjamorim/opera2.png

That seemed to have been a broken cookie issue. It's fixed after I cleaned all cookies related to hydrogenaudio.

The video forums have been integrated more tightly due to the relatively lower popularity. I hope we can get rid of some ballast and have it less scattered this way. Specifically, this is what happened:

"MPEG4 Quality Forum" -> integrated with "MPEG4 Basic Usage" which is now called "MPEG4 Discussion".

"Other Video Formats" -> integrated with "General A/V".

"Video Capture/TV Cards" -> integrated with "General A/V".

"A/V Uploads" -> cancelled, people can use the normal "Uploads" forum instead.


edit: While i'm at it, "Music Forum Related Discussion" is cancelled too. The section "Site Related Discussion" really seems to be enough.

It appears that new posts since the upgrade fix this problem (topics that haven't been posted in since, still do). Invision must of made some changes to the database and/or the structure of the queries so a fix is probably not that straight forward.

It's not at all obvious that the login on the home / portal page is not the login for the forums. So when it rejects the login, says no user with that name exists, lets you create another login with the same user name, etc - it's confusing.

I'm sure that setup makes sense in some HA way, but not in the normal ordinary human being way. Perhaps add some notice / information to that effect on the login page.

Yeah. Obviously things are still suboptimal as of now and we are working on solutions.

We just wanted to get the boards back up as fast as possible.
It's our hope that the new frontpage, which hopefully will be redesigned and more usable soon, is going to cause interest in the new Wiki.
You don't need to have a seperate account to edit the wiki, it's editable by everybody.

that happened to me. please mods, delete the "kwnbs" user i created yesterday on the wiki.

i don't know, but i just don't like the new layout, the wiki should share hald the space with the new topics ... HA is about community =)

Wiki's are about community also.

But beside that, I already said I'd have the other stuff working soon.

Go Dib

I really miss the old forums where I could view both news and active topics on one page. To me, the update has made HA a lot less usable.

Just my 2¢.