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Pardon our construction

Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
in Zocalo v2.0
You might notice these forums look a lot different than our old ones. We are using Vanilla now. Essentially vB broke and couldn't be fixed, so after spending a year and a half and a couple hundred dollars in product upgrades trying to make them work and hounding vB tech support to no avail, we got rid of the bloatware called vBulletin 5 and replaced it with a nice, simple, free product used on such large websites as Star Citizen.

The good news is we lost nothing. The bad news is we have to make this thing look decent! The default skin sucks :)

Comments

  • SpiritOneSpiritOne Magneto ABQ NM
    Just because I run another website with vBulletin as the forum software, exactly what broke?
  • Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
    1. The ability to post new threads, especially in Zocalo.
    2. The ability to reply to new threads, especially in Zocalo.

    I did a bit of investigating - basically vBulletin 5's bloatware made a MySQL query that was a join so huge that MySQL killed it because of memory limits after trying to process the query for something like 30 seconds. I think it was trying to do a join across close to 7000 threads over the past 13 years as part of its message posting process (guessing search system or such), but basically MySQL couldn't handle the query.
  • Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
    A few other problems included (a) search system didn't work right, (b) you could only look at threads active within 30 days or so, regardless of how long you set your time to, (c) every single patch broke our attempt to skin it, (d) several of the features that we used in vBulletin 3 were not yet available in vBulletin 5.

    I am sure there were others...
  • Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
    I'm sure people are asking: why Firstones.net instead of Firstones.com? Well, two big reasons:

    1. Firstones.com is hosted by Dreamhost. Dreamhost has become a massive headache with security breaches that no one seems to care about to the point I don't want to deal with them any more. And as Sanfam (who owns the Dreamhost account) is missing with Real Life, I don't know of any easy way to get the domain switched over to this server (Lorien might be able to help, since he owns the Firstones.com domain name).

    2. Firstones.com is for Babylon 5 only - we've been talking in IRC the past few months and want to expand it to scifi in general, not just Babylon 5. It's hard getting new people to the site when focusing on a show that went off the air about 15 years ago. Therefore we want to take the Firstones idea and expand it into a new site with the same feel as the old one. We'll still keep Firstones.com going, mods and such, but we've got to clean up the garbage that was puked all over the site by the hackers first.
  • A2597A2597 Fanboy
    ...WE'RE BACK!!! BOO YEA!
    Thanks for all the work RC! :)
  • DarthCaligulaDarthCaligula Elite Ranger
    Any chance that the old archive stuff of the cancelled game will be restored? Or is it hidden here?
  • Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
    You mean the mod sites or the HTML pages? Both were heavily infested by the hacker's code and have to manually reviewed page by page before they can be reposted.
  • DarthCaligulaDarthCaligula Elite Ranger
    Yeah, I meant the old stuff about Into the Fire. It would be a shame to lose that stuff.
    Any chance this might help? https://web.archive.org/web/20070120035125/http://www.firstones.com/b5games/
  • Capt.MontoyaCapt.Montoya Ranger
    Construction very much pardoned, indeed even welcomed!
    Good to see these forums back, one of my favorite lurking places. :-)
  • JackNJackN <font color=#99FF99>Lightwave Alien</font>
    Wow, I feel like a Firstone who just woke up from a long sleep...
  • WORFWORF The Burninator
    Those pesky younger races, always having to come wake us up! Oh well, might as well cause a few galactic wars now that we're up :)
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