Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Site Update (problems and issues)

Status
Not open for further replies.

ElectroMaster

Administrator
We recently upgraded the software which powers this web site to the latest version of vbulletin Which is 4.0.1

Why

The new vbulletin system has a new CMS (content management system) to handle content in the form of articles, this will benefit ETO greatly because it will be perfect for the current electronic theory articles, and the electronic projects. At the moment they are all just lumped into a forum which is messy and confuses new members. This will allow articles to have their own dedicated place.

The new software is also supposed to use the most modern markup language (css) to display the forum which should be faster and more efficient. It should also allow better modification to add new features. Additionally the software was meant to be backwards compatible with older browsers.

The Problem

Deciding on upgrading was clear, wait until the software was a final release, and had passed the vbulletin's quality guidelines. I waited until vBulletin 4.0 Gold was released to the public. Paid my money and started testing. The database transfered okay and everything worked on my development server. So I went ahead and upgraded the main forum.

Within half a day problems started arising. Firstly there were several bugs spotted, features from the older version of vbulletin that were commonly used by members had disapeared. And on top of that, older browsers ceased to display the site correctly.

I feel that vbulletin has massifly dropped the ball and is border line criminal for releasing a product to the public with so many known bugs. But more importantly, I dropped the ball. I do feel extremely bad for regular members who visit to this site day in and day out helping out others, and for it to be broken. That sucks. I appologize and will be working very hard over the next few weeks to bring ETO back up to standard.

Known Issues

There are some known issues still..
  • Sidebar: covers the forum on smaller resolutions
  • Sidebar: hide button does not work on older browsers
  • Search: Missing Subscription icons
  • Search: missing main icon for some content types
  • Search (Advanced): Cannot search users posts - it only shows threads started.
  • Posts: Some monitors display the post crammed to the left side (semi fixed)
  • Posts: Insert Code size issue (semi fixed)
  • Reply With Quote: On some browsers the reply gets squashed to the right..
  • Forum Display: Mark As Read drop down option doesn't work correctly.
  • Blog: Attachments are missing for older posts.
Reporting An Issue

Since the upgrade there have been over 100 posts which I have just cleaned up (they have either been fixed or are now in the list above) so please when posting an issue please ALWAYS state your browser, screen resolution, operating system and as many details as possible (like what page it happened on). This will allow me to replicate it and then finding a fix.

Thank you all for your patience, I do apologize for the inconvenience to everyone.

Regards,
EM
 
Last edited:
I see text doesn't work after a smiley is put in place. apparently they all have to go in last now? :(

And aperantly there now is a mystery key that backs me up one page and dumps everything I had typed up to that point?.:mad:

This post was far longer but guess what I hit and now I dont feel like retyping all of it again? :mad:
 
One quick note, when you click 'new posts' the number of posts listed is only returned at the bottom of the page, it used to be on the top of the page IE posts 1-20 or 90 page 1 of 5
 
I hope I'm not overstepping any bounds here, but I think it would be helpful to post the fixes that are coming in the next maintenance update (4.0.2) that's coming in a couple weeks. That way people know what other issues have been dealt with. The 'Find all threads' and IE6 compatibility issues, I know have been brought up here.


• [Ads] Quote and Advert in First post content
• [Search] "Find All Threads" by person
• [IE6] All remaining IE 6 Compatibility issues
• [CSS] CSS Caching Bugs
• [BB Codes] BB Codes tags should count against minimum text requirement
• [Lightbox] Date and name overlap in the Lightbox if the picture is relatively small
• [Tags] Edit Tags Degradation -> You cannot add any tags. Please remove some first.
• [Fixed Width] Doc Width - bug #35038
• [Signatures] <p> cannot be used to enclose signatures
• [Languages] Stripped characters - ä,ö,å
• [Settings] User link broken in Settings -> New Visitor Messages
• [Polls] Fixed issue with poll question too long error
• [Groups]: The "View All Groups" page needs significant improvements
• [Hook] Hook Member-Action Dropdown items unset problem
• [Updated UI] User Settings Pages
• [Updated UI] Registration Screens
• [Updated UI] Advanced Search Pages
• [Updated UI] Moderation Pop-up Menu
• [CMS Query Count] Reducing CMS Query Count - Phase 2
• [Language Support] Additional Charset Support
• [CMS Import] CMS Impex [Beta]
• (new) [CMS] Articles can be sorted "Alphabetically", "
• (new) [CMS] Added Pagination to Section Pages. Pagination replaces the "View All" link.
• And about 100 more bugs.
 
Hi EM,
One feature I do miss is at the bottom of the forum the 10 last posts used to be displayed. I see now that annoying pane on the right has replaced it and is mucking up the main forum page atleast on my computer. In the next update if the old feature could be re-intstated it would be great.
I also found it was an easy way to see if any spam posts were done too.

Regards Bryan
 
The last couple of posts to this thread have disappeared!!

Edit, see attached!!! How did that happen?

Mike.
 

Attachments

  • Strange.png
    Strange.png
    154 KB · Views: 248
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top