New Forum

9 minutes ago, Breezeep said:

Post hell is objectively the best thing about doomworld. I get to look at all the idiots who get loser'd.

*subjectively

I like the Editing information and the people who are always helping others.

I couldn't care less about Post Hell.

10 minutes ago, Pavera said:

Post hell is where it belongs, in hell.

Reported.

OK, so:

• I was hoping I could just bring back up the old /idgames db as a stopgap but it's more trouble than I had originally hoped. Lots of the database code is written in stuff that is so old and unsafe that the PHP developers deprecated it completely in PHP7, so that has to all be gone over and fixed.
• Anyone know about about nginx configuration? Namely, setting up locations and aliases and rewrites and redirects. I am still trying to find a tutorial that just explains it in a straightforward manner.
• Luckily for me, the idgames API https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/api/ was written in a much more modern and friendly manner and so getting that up and running again was almost painless.

I'm not deprecating the /idgames database, and I underestimated how much of a mass freakout people would have over it being unavailable temporarily, considering no one ever comments on it except to complain that it sucks.

@Linguica

Right now, the new forum isn't working for a lot of people (including me) if they don't disable IPv6.  Might want to look into that.  Also, now that I'm at home instead of at work, a lot of the forum icons (like the "alarm" button) are just random junk that looks like missing images.

LOL, I forgot to add "www" to the start of the A record for the IPv6 address. Hopefully the DNS will propagate in a timely fashion this time.

6 minutes ago, Linguica said:

I'm not deprecating the /idgames database, and I underestimated how much of a mass freakout people would have over it being unavailable temporarily, considering no one ever comments on it except to complain that it sucks.

Thank you for the response, this is reassuring. I had hoped its unavailability was temporary but I don't think that was clear to many.

The fact is, the frontend "just worked" and gave a nice little summary of each wad in a massive archive, along with an abstraction of the mirror system for downloading it. This made it very successful as a canonical place to link to a wad, such that every site that talks about classic Doom, wads, and mods has hundreds if not thousands of dw/idgames links. Think of all the links as implicit thanks for running the service. You must derive some satisfaction from its success, surely, even if it seems most users take it for granted.

38 minutes ago, Linguica said:

Anyone know about about nginx configuration? Namely, setting up locations and aliases and rewrites and redirects. I am still trying to find a tutorial that just explains it in a straightforward manner.

I have some experience with it from ZDoom.org.

I haven't blown anything up, yet. (So far)

Holy shit. This just gave me the realization I only browsed blogs, losers, and post hell...

Hmm, is there a reachable URL from the Files section that doesn't require a numeric ID? For NEIS, we'd need to alias this:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/Ports/megawads/neis

...to this:

https://www.doomworld.com/files/file/18645-no-end-in-sight/

...and it isn't possible to do a straight URL rewrite thanks to that pesky 18645. :(

Worst-case, we'd need some sort of shim page (a .php or something) that would run some sort of query to translate A to B, though that's more work of course.

[Mostly I ask because I was considering throwing together a sample rewrite rule; just did this earlier today, heh]

51 minutes ago, Linguica said:

I'm not deprecating the /idgames database, and I underestimated how much of a mass freakout people would have over it being unavailable temporarily, considering no one ever comments on it except to complain that it sucks.

Nobody writes in to say "Everything's great and no issues" ;)

2 hours ago, ultradoom said:

For whatever reason the site is slow as hell. 

I knew that this software was going to be a lot heavier than 2002 era vbulletin but god damn watching htop is insane. It's EASILY ten times more computrons than the old one - and that's with the supposed speed gains from running nginx instead of apache. 

2 hours ago, printz said:

The difference is that Linguica actually paid for this so it has to deliver for him. It's not like he can just "quit".

Sure I can- I try not to fall victim to the sink cost fallacy. Of course if people had a fundraiser to pay me back the money I blew it would make it easier to do if the new software proves untenable. 

1 hour ago, Xaser said:

A bunch of avatars (mine included) got scaled for some reason

I ran a script to resize all gif and png avatars by 300%. I prefer sharp pixels to smeary bilinear upscaling (sound familiar...)

1 hour ago, Xaser said:

CSS

I would be glad to have you contribute to the design, lord knows I need the help. But I should set it up so you can work on the "real" CSS and template files so you have a better appreciation of the undertaking. 

1 hour ago, chungy said:

Is there a way to disable the rich text post editing? It's seriously clashing with my browser navigation keys.

I doubt it, one of the big selling points of the software is OMG WYSIWYG EDITOR. For what it's worth most bbcode tags still work unofficially so you could probably Adblock the JavaScript file for the editor and get along ok. 

1 hour ago, RUSH said:

This forum looks like my iPhone screen maximized to fit on a standard desktop display. Vertical rectangle world, complete with black bars on the sides like it's a 240p YouTube video circa 2007.

The max width is currently... 1300 pixels or so? I don't understand how people want pages wider than that - do you like reading whole paragraphs on a single line? That said, it will be EXTREMELY easy to add an alternate theme that makes it as wide as you want, but I want to work on the theme more first so I don't have to duplicate effort. Actually I could maybe fashion some JavaScript thing to let you switch on the fly but my JS is weak. 

As for post hell, I really, really REALLY want to get rid of it. It was a cute novelty in 2002 but social media on the internet is enough of a shitty trash pit today that I have zero interest in doing anything to even obliquely glorify shitposting and trolling and other bad behavior.

12 minutes ago, Xaser said:

Hmm, is there a reachable URL from the Files section that doesn't require a numeric ID?

Not as of now, I'm going to have to write some code in the software to give it the brains to work out the file from an URL like that. 

2 minutes ago, Linguica said:

As for post hell, I really, really REALLY want to get rid of it. It was a cute novelty in 2002 but social media on the internet is enough of a shitty trash pit today that I have zero interest in doing anything to even obliquely glorify shitposting and trolling and other bad behavior.

I don't consider it glorifying idiocy. I think of it as, "See these stupid posts? Try to not do this."

Basically a reverse role model.

2 minutes ago, Linguica said:

I would be glad to have you contribute to the design, lord knows I need the help. But I should set it up so you can work on the "real" CSS and template files so you have a better appreciation of the undertaking. 

Yup, I'd be happy to pitch in (despite my earlier gripeyness, heh). Being able to edit the theme proper would be grand. Right now I'm prototyping it with a user stylesheet, but that only goes so far.

Regarding avatars, I've already zapped the style to stop the upscaling for avatars larger than 90x90, so that can be nipped in the bud as well.

6 minutes ago, Linguica said:

As for post hell, I really, really REALLY want to get rid of it. It was a cute novelty in 2002 but social media on the internet is enough of a shitty trash pit today that I have zero interest in doing anything to even obliquely glorify shitposting and trolling and other bad behavior.

Don't think of it as glorification, think of it as showing new users what kind of behavior isn't tolerated.

#SavePostHell2017

Also, I don't like this new website layout at all. It looks like an april fools joke gone too far.

I'm sorry.

While people have gripes, one thing is for sure: with all the additional interaction options added (like status updates, liking posts and real-time updates) the forum already feels like a more dynamic and "living" place than before. And anything that encourages further interaction between the members is a definite good thing.

With that in mind: at some point yes please to a custom theme that goes full width. Being able to fit more text onto the page is always welcome.

thats pretty much my opinion

The new forum looks and feels very slick. The mobile experience on the old software was getting much too cumbersome, and the original homepage just served as monument to the longevity of the site. The front-page is now something I could legitimately kill time on whereas before the only thing that you could really do before was dig into a graveyard of broken hosted sites. 

Is there any idea of how /newstuff chronicles and the Cacowards are going to be handled?  I can only imagine the former being depreciated as the Downloads section is a catch-all for recent idgames activity.

Meanwhile, I like that red bar at the top. I have no idea why.

20 minutes ago, Linguica said:

As for post hell, I really, really REALLY want to get rid of it. It was a cute novelty in 2002 but social media on the internet is enough of a shitty trash pit today that I have zero interest in doing anything to even obliquely glorify shitposting and trolling and other bad behavior.

But... But... I mean... Alright, alright. You've made a rock solid point, but... It was gone just like that, you know? I couldn't even look at it for a last time and say "goodbye". 

All things considered, I think people will get used to it not being a thing anymore. Maybe it'll be somewhat of an "insider thing" in a year or so. And I really think we should try and make a post-hell community project to say our goodbyes. This forum was the only one I knew that had such a thing, so in that regard it was quite a special trash pit for me personally, eventhough I am not around for as long as some of the other folks.

I suppose it isn't that bad..

Can the old layout at least be emulated for those that prefer it?

5 minutes ago, Sure Bowb said:

But... But... I mean... Alright, alright. You've made a rock solid point, but... It was gone just like that, you know? I couldn't even look at it for a last time and say "goodbye". 

All things considered, I think people will get used to it not being a thing anymore. Maybe it'll be somewhat of an "insider thing" in a year or so. And I really think we should try and make a post-hell community project to say our goodbyes. This forum was the only one I knew that had such a thing, so in that regard it was quite a special trash pit for me personally, eventhough I am not around for as long as some of the other folks.

You can still say your goodbyes.  View the site on a smartphone with IPv6 enabled.  You probably don't have much time left, though.

34 minutes ago, Linguica said:

social media on the internet is enough of a shitty trash pit today that I have zero interest in doing anything to even obliquely glorify shitposting and trolling and other bad behavior.

So, to put it another way, this is all @doom_txt's fault? I knew those pusillanimous ne'er-do-wells would be the doom of us all.

@LinguicaMy fears are assuaged -- the goal is pretty clearly now "hey, if it's broken, let's fix it", so let's fix it. :)

On that front, if it helps, here's a (untested) candidate nginx rewrite rule:

server {
    
#   stuff here

    location ~ /idgames/ {
        rewrite ^.*?\/idgames\/(.+)$ "/files_resolver.php?path=$1" last;
        return 404;
    }
}

It's a bit dumb, but ought to work; basically what it does is redirects to "files_resolver.php" (replace with whatever the custom code lump is named), takes the URL path after /idgames, and shoves it into a query string named "path", which can be read from within the php resolver code.

e.g. if you feed it:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/Ports/megawads/neis

...it ought to act as if you were going to:

https://www.doomworld.com/files_resolver.php?path=levels%2Ports%2megawads%2neis

[not 100% sure on how the slash encoding is going to show up but it really ought to url-encode if nginx has any wits about it; apologies for not being certain -- haven't had a need to actually use this myself yet]

Just a fraction of the solution, but it's a start.

I'm also presuming the server block's host is "doomworld.com", e.g. not a subfolder or anything. Lemme know if you need a hand with the teaks.

[Apologies to Rachael for the topic snipe. :P ]

Might take some time to get used to the new layout, but it's looks quite an improvement over the old one, my only complaint it's that news should be the main landing page instead of the forum, but that's just me, overall im glad to see the site updated

Gonna miss post hell, it sure gave me a good laugh every once in a while, but i can live without it

https://www.doomworld.com/newstuff/

That's a strange error message, like it's redirecting to an admin-only part of the forum.

For those who miss Post Hell

50 minutes ago, Xaser said:

[Apologies to Rachael for the topic snipe. :P ]

Have at it. nginx is still somewhat a mystery to me. All I can tell you is I have Randi's configuration that I can use as a template. But I don't know how it would work.

You're probably better off sending all that stuff right into a php script anyway, as you suggested. :)

Old site no longer exist D:

Long live Doomworld