Author Topic: The Forums are back!  (Read 13850 times)

Offline Morgul

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The Forums are back!
« on: November 13, 2017, 10:41:00 am »
It has been six years since these forums have been online. The latest post was form March, 2011. I don't even remember why they went offline, but they did and eventually they disappeared for good. Or so I thought, since I didn't have a single backup of them.

However...


Thanks to Mike Burk (and several hours of my time doing weird arcane things with a CentOS vm from 2012, cpanel, three dockers, and a few hundred lines of node.js code) I was able to get a backup of the forums migrated to the latest SMF, and the latest mysql. Registration's (temporarily) disabled, but posts and everything should work.

Where do we go from here?

There's a lot of just ancient posts and topics on this board. I mean, it's all ancient, since it hasn't been live for 6 years. But most of the projects and other things have been put on the dusty shelf, or imploded.

But let's be honest, most of us don't remember the game this forums was born around. We remember the Mafia games, the Wars, the community we built here. This was where a lot of us met, and made friendships that lasted years.

And some that, sadly, ended far too soon.

My intention is to open these back up to registration, and get them into a more stable, maintainable state. I want to build a community again, and breath some more life into these old, dusty boards. But a community of one is not a community. I'm announcing this topic, with the hopes that some of you still have those emails (lord knows, some of us never change), see the message, and decide to come back, even if just to laugh at our much younger selves.

Then, we (as a community) need to decide what we want to do with these. Archive all the old stuff, and try to make some shiny new boards and move on? Keep these forums in an archived state, and disable posting? Start over from scratch with new software, new posts, and a new mission?

Whatever we decide; my intention is to keep these forums running indefinitely. There's meaning in that for me, so I'll gladly keep spending the time required to keep them up.

--Chris
« Last Edit: November 13, 2017, 10:56:32 am by Morgul »
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett

Offline Noonien

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2017, 01:23:56 pm »
Yay. 😁
# Insert 3 laws here b/c it's too long for a sig.

Offline Morgul

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #2 on: November 13, 2017, 02:15:35 pm »
Yay. 😁

There's still a lot of work to do dusting everything off, (like building a docker image that isn't going to fall over if I try to update it, setting up database backups, etc) and then building a nice theme that isn't half broken, but I'm kinda really excited about doing it.

I really should be working right now... but... :effort:
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett

Offline contingencyplan

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #3 on: November 13, 2017, 07:56:38 pm »
I can confirm that the forgotten password functionality is working as intended. :P
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. 
    ~Robert Wilensky

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
    ~GK Chesterton

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
    ~Blaise Pascal

Offline Morgul

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #4 on: November 13, 2017, 10:10:47 pm »
Sweet! That's good!

I just had an odd fight with logging in, had to add ?theme=1 to the url to get logged back in. Seems some of the themes are more broken than others... I really need to get on this whole make a new theme thing... since I think the default SMF theme is ugly as hell..

Yaaay, old software! :suicide:
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett

Offline Morgul

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #5 on: November 14, 2017, 09:36:18 pm »
I just had an odd fight with logging in, had to add ?theme=1 to the url to get logged back in. Seems some of the themes are more broken than others... I really need to get on this whole make a new theme thing... since I think the default SMF theme is ugly as hell..


I made a new forum theme! It looks like the one Dave made, only modified, since porting his wasn't going to be an option...


There's some rough edges still, probably, but just let me know and I'll tackle them.  :D
« Last Edit: November 14, 2017, 09:39:46 pm by Morgul »
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett

Offline PieceMaker

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #6 on: November 28, 2017, 10:35:27 pm »
Yay!  :rara: (I forgot about that one!)
The true hacker almost always accuses the non-hacker of doing the hacking. - PieceMaker

Offline Morgul

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #7 on: December 01, 2017, 11:46:30 am »
Yeah, I remember you being a fan of that one.  :D
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett

Offline xofelf

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #8 on: December 05, 2017, 02:30:48 pm »
I had forgotten how much I loved all these smilies and missed them on the other forums I frequent.

Also, my vote is to archive the old shit. And my reason is because oh dear god, first outings onto the Internet Erica is not something anyone really needs to experience in their life again.
~Erica~

"if at first you don't succeed, then skydiving is not for you"

Offline Morgul

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #9 on: December 05, 2017, 02:33:03 pm »
[...] And my reason is because oh dear god, first outings onto the Internet Erica is not something anyone really needs to experience in their life again.

That sounds like a reason to keep them front and center. Maybe even modify the theme with an 'Erica post of the day!' feature.  :D
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett

Offline xofelf

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #10 on: December 05, 2017, 02:41:13 pm »
[...] And my reason is because oh dear god, first outings onto the Internet Erica is not something anyone really needs to experience in their life again.

That sounds like a reason to keep them front and center. Maybe even modify the theme with an 'Erica post of the day!' feature.  :D
I will murder you in your sleep.  :mad:
~Erica~

"if at first you don't succeed, then skydiving is not for you"

Offline Morgul

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #11 on: December 05, 2017, 02:44:43 pm »
I will murder you in your sleep.  :mad:

Bring it on, oh sibling of mine.
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett

Offline Infernal

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #12 on: January 21, 2018, 08:23:41 pm »
Hey guys!
I still wistfully think back of my time playing with you all.  You guys were truly my family for couple years.
I would love to take a trip down to Lubbock and meet you guys in the flesh!

Yesterday We Obeyed Kings And Bent Our Necks To Emperors. Today We Kneel Only To Truth - Kahlil Gibran

Offline PieceMaker

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #13 on: January 28, 2018, 07:35:32 pm »
Whudup Infernal!
The true hacker almost always accuses the non-hacker of doing the hacking. - PieceMaker

Offline Morgul

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Re: The Forums are back!
« Reply #14 on: August 04, 2019, 11:16:59 pm »
After a brief (several month) outage, the forums are back again, again.

What happened

Turns out ESXI has this annoying "feature" where it will delete all linked hard drives from a VM when you "unlink" a vm, even if other vms have the hard drives linked. So, an emergency move of the VM server this was hosted on (due to a full hard drive) ended with the data drive being completely deleted.

Originally, I thought everything on the server was lost. Turns out, I was able to recover the main OS drive, and since the mysql db that runs these forums was in a docker, and docker was on the main OS, all I had to do was to rebuild the rest from the original backup.

So, we're back... again?
"Just because my math may tell lies doesn't mean that I don't understand the quantum mechanics of it all." --Caenus

The popular videogame "Doom" is based loosely around the time Satan borrowed two bucks from Vin Diesel and forgot to pay him back.

"In the beginning there was nothing. And it exploded." --Terry Pratchett