Greetings, PWO Players, and it's a pleasure to talk to you again.
I'd like to welcome you all to the relaunch of the PWO Forum. As you can see, a few things have changed since the last time we had a public Forum for all to access. A lot of this is to do with a change to the software, as we have once again migrated the Forum and we are now running MyBB, instead of the previous phpBB.
Why did you change the Forum?
As you may know, some weeks ago our Web Server suffered a hard drive failure. The result of this failure was that our websites had to be restored from backups; and various software had to be reinstalled, which caused some downtime of all the services; though, thanks to quick work from Bluerise, the site itself was quickly restored and the Playerdex soon followed.
While we were restoring the web server, Bluerise took the opportunity to update much of what our server uses to serve our websites, one of those changes being that we now run PHP 7, which is a lot more capable and modern. Unfortunately, it later turned out that phpBB - the Forum we'd been using for the last several years - does not support PHP7, and did not plan to support it until phpBB 3.2 launched. This was supposed to happen at the end of the month, but it was later delayed and is now not expected to happen until the end of July.
We were left in a sticky situation. We now had a server that was too modern for our Forum. Downgrading would cause issues later; and we weren't willing to make people wait many more months to have a working Forum again. Our decision was to find a new Forum that supported PHP7; but allowed us to maintain our existing data so that people's threads, posts, PMs and so on remained. We found the answer to our prayers in MyBB, and though it took several weeks to migrate everything over, we are confident it will serve us better for the foreseeable future.
What does this change mean?
For the most part, it's business as usual. While you will definitely notice a number of changes as you use the Forum more, MyBB is very similar in design to phpBB; and supports many of the same features, plus some additions. Should you find anything confusing, the new Forum comes with its own Help Documents; which I am also adding to myself over time.
However, I thought I should spend the time to mention some useful things.
MyBB uses a visual editor for posting now, meaning that "What You See Is What You Get". When you use features like Bold, Underline, different colours etc, you will see exactly what your post looks like as you type it. BBCode is still supported for those who prefer it, and you can go back to using BBCode instead either by clicking "View source code" on the editor, or make this the default by going to your User CP, Clicking "Edit Options", and checking the box "Put the editor in source mode by default".
Should you choose to use BBCode (or MyCode, as MyBB refers to it), there are a few changes:
Quoting posts has also changed. In the past, if you quoted a post, you were instantly taken to the "Post Reply" form. This doesn't happen in MyBB, for one reason: MyBB allows you to quote multiple posts in one go! When you click the Quote button, the post will be marked for quoting; then, when you click "Post Reply", EVERY post you've marked will be quoted! We will be overseeing use of this feature over the next few weeks, so please do not abuse it. You can also still reply to a single post by clicking the "Reply" button on the post itself.
On the topic of posts, MyBB allows posts to be laid out in two ways. The Classic Mode, which is what we've set by default, puts all the information about the user who posts a message to the left, and their posts to the right, as you're probably all used to by now:
However, you can change it to have the information on top of the post instead:
If you want to try this layout, you can toggle it by unchecking "Display posts in classic mode" in the Edit Options page mentioned earlier. For more information, I've written about it in our Help section.
Why not also spend time updating your profile? If you do, you'll find another new option. MyBB now lets players write their own Biographies, meaning you can once again add your own text to your Forum Profiles. Make your profile unique again! You can also set whether to automatically accept new Friends - unlike our old Forum, when you add a new friend on MyBB, the person you add is informed you added them. Depending on their settings, they will either have to approve the friend request (similar to how friends work in PWO itself); or they can automatically have you added to their friends list too. Mutual friendship!
There is a little bad news. If you were using Folders to manage your PMs, these were not converted to MyBB, so you'll need to create them and reorganise your PMs again. PMs are also no longer editable after sending. Additionally, due to the hard drive failure that triggered this change, files that were attached to newer posts and PMs may now no longer exist.
Will this affect links to other topics?
Since MyBB's link structure is different, links to topics, forums and profiles may have changed. Where links have been posted on the Forum, we have attempted to update them to lead to the correct location or the closest we can find; however, some links may still be incorrect. Also, any bookmarks you made for topics likely do not work any more, and may return "Page Not Found" errors.
I have a problem with the new Forum!
If you have an issue with the Forum where something is not working as you expected, or not working at all, please report this via the Bug Catcher on the Playerdex and we'll take a look. Please also report this way any visual errors affecting the look of the Forum itself.
If you have noticed a post or signature which looks odd or broken - such as oversized text, messed up layout, random HTML or any other visual mistake - we have opened a topic in Player Support for you to report this. Please link to the post or user which has the problem; or if the problem is in your own signature, please include your signature with your post.
Thanks for your time!
I'd like to welcome you all to the relaunch of the PWO Forum. As you can see, a few things have changed since the last time we had a public Forum for all to access. A lot of this is to do with a change to the software, as we have once again migrated the Forum and we are now running MyBB, instead of the previous phpBB.
Why did you change the Forum?
As you may know, some weeks ago our Web Server suffered a hard drive failure. The result of this failure was that our websites had to be restored from backups; and various software had to be reinstalled, which caused some downtime of all the services; though, thanks to quick work from Bluerise, the site itself was quickly restored and the Playerdex soon followed.
While we were restoring the web server, Bluerise took the opportunity to update much of what our server uses to serve our websites, one of those changes being that we now run PHP 7, which is a lot more capable and modern. Unfortunately, it later turned out that phpBB - the Forum we'd been using for the last several years - does not support PHP7, and did not plan to support it until phpBB 3.2 launched. This was supposed to happen at the end of the month, but it was later delayed and is now not expected to happen until the end of July.
We were left in a sticky situation. We now had a server that was too modern for our Forum. Downgrading would cause issues later; and we weren't willing to make people wait many more months to have a working Forum again. Our decision was to find a new Forum that supported PHP7; but allowed us to maintain our existing data so that people's threads, posts, PMs and so on remained. We found the answer to our prayers in MyBB, and though it took several weeks to migrate everything over, we are confident it will serve us better for the foreseeable future.
What does this change mean?
For the most part, it's business as usual. While you will definitely notice a number of changes as you use the Forum more, MyBB is very similar in design to phpBB; and supports many of the same features, plus some additions. Should you find anything confusing, the new Forum comes with its own Help Documents; which I am also adding to myself over time.
However, I thought I should spend the time to mention some useful things.
MyBB uses a visual editor for posting now, meaning that "What You See Is What You Get". When you use features like Bold, Underline, different colours etc, you will see exactly what your post looks like as you type it. BBCode is still supported for those who prefer it, and you can go back to using BBCode instead either by clicking "View source code" on the editor, or make this the default by going to your User CP, Clicking "Edit Options", and checking the box "Put the editor in source mode by default".
Should you choose to use BBCode (or MyCode, as MyBB refers to it), there are a few changes:
- [size] is now different. While in the past, you had to use numbers over 100 for big text and below 100 for small text, MyBB uses a scaling system instead. Sizes now go from 1 (smallest) to 7 (largest). Alternatively, you can use "xx-small", "x-small", "small", "medium", "large", "x-large" and "xx-large" as sizes
- Codes that take an argument no longer require " around the argument. In other words, if you have a tag like:
You must type it like shown above, without " marks. The below will no longer work:Code:[font=Times New Roman]Text[/font]
Code:[font="Times New Roman"]Text[/font] - You no longer need a closing tag for horizontal lines. So no more [/hr].
Quoting posts has also changed. In the past, if you quoted a post, you were instantly taken to the "Post Reply" form. This doesn't happen in MyBB, for one reason: MyBB allows you to quote multiple posts in one go! When you click the Quote button, the post will be marked for quoting; then, when you click "Post Reply", EVERY post you've marked will be quoted! We will be overseeing use of this feature over the next few weeks, so please do not abuse it. You can also still reply to a single post by clicking the "Reply" button on the post itself.
On the topic of posts, MyBB allows posts to be laid out in two ways. The Classic Mode, which is what we've set by default, puts all the information about the user who posts a message to the left, and their posts to the right, as you're probably all used to by now:
However, you can change it to have the information on top of the post instead:
If you want to try this layout, you can toggle it by unchecking "Display posts in classic mode" in the Edit Options page mentioned earlier. For more information, I've written about it in our Help section.
Why not also spend time updating your profile? If you do, you'll find another new option. MyBB now lets players write their own Biographies, meaning you can once again add your own text to your Forum Profiles. Make your profile unique again! You can also set whether to automatically accept new Friends - unlike our old Forum, when you add a new friend on MyBB, the person you add is informed you added them. Depending on their settings, they will either have to approve the friend request (similar to how friends work in PWO itself); or they can automatically have you added to their friends list too. Mutual friendship!
There is a little bad news. If you were using Folders to manage your PMs, these were not converted to MyBB, so you'll need to create them and reorganise your PMs again. PMs are also no longer editable after sending. Additionally, due to the hard drive failure that triggered this change, files that were attached to newer posts and PMs may now no longer exist.
Will this affect links to other topics?
Since MyBB's link structure is different, links to topics, forums and profiles may have changed. Where links have been posted on the Forum, we have attempted to update them to lead to the correct location or the closest we can find; however, some links may still be incorrect. Also, any bookmarks you made for topics likely do not work any more, and may return "Page Not Found" errors.
I have a problem with the new Forum!
If you have an issue with the Forum where something is not working as you expected, or not working at all, please report this via the Bug Catcher on the Playerdex and we'll take a look. Please also report this way any visual errors affecting the look of the Forum itself.
If you have noticed a post or signature which looks odd or broken - such as oversized text, messed up layout, random HTML or any other visual mistake - we have opened a topic in Player Support for you to report this. Please link to the post or user which has the problem; or if the problem is in your own signature, please include your signature with your post.
Thanks for your time!
