Just to let anyone know who may be a little confused at the moment, that we have switched our forum ‘engine’ from EZBoard to InfoPop.

This adds a whole range of new features (posting music, printing out posts...) all of which you can read about by clicking on “Forum FAQ” above.

The only downside is that you will need to register here (if you were previously registered on EZBoard your name etc won’t just automatically work here I’m afraid).

Please go to the “New user” page above and register. It’ll only take a few seconds. (We will also work hard to make sure ‘seasoned’ Mo’Bros and Mo’Sis’s will be given their appropriately experienced titles next week, i.e. not continue to appear as ‘Newcomers!’)

Apologies for any confusion or inconvenience caused by this, but we feel certain that the new system will be quicker, more usable, and more fun than the old one, and that it’ll only take a few minutes of set-up and usage for people to get used to it.

If you have any problems whatsoever please contact .

Enjoy the new forums, and the weekend!

MM

Re: Expanded threads

The new look and possibilities are just fine, you needed to use the Ultimate Bulletin Board from the start as it’s simply an industry standard. I’m glad you’ve come to this configuration.

But there’s a minor issue. Would you please consider removing or maybe user-disabling the expanded thread list that shows all the replies in the thread as additional topics? I guess UBB default settings are just fine, in the way that they mark the threads that’ve changed since your last visit.

There’s no need to specifically mark the new replies I think, because I’ve barely seen a MotiForum topic with more than three pages in it anyway. Expanded list only adds to confusion in my opinion.

Re: Expanded threads

I agree with DmitryKo’s comments. Too redundant and confusing, but I’m sure you’ll sort that out soon.
Noise

Re: Threads list

OK, the modified interface is pretty decent. Especially the number of recent replies in parentheses. The last poster’s name is cool… wait, isn’t this meant to be the standard feature since UBB 5.x?!! :D

PS. I wonder why I see no graphical smilies in the posts… can it be because I’ve disabled the “View user’s pictures with their posts” checkbox?..
[Edit] No, it can’t. So what’s wrong?
[Edit2] You need to specify your server’s timezone somewhere…

EDM

You guys are doing a fantastic job. The time offset works fine. Thanks, Brian

Re: Threads list

DmitryKo,

Last poster’s name isn’t standard… You have to add new fields in the database and the appropriate queries to use/update it.

1. Graphical smiles will be checked out (UBB code turned off, for now). Should be available really good with HTML.

2. The server’s timezone is PDT. On the editdisplay page, you have the server’s current date, so you can adjust the offset to your location.

Re: Last poster

OK, but I’ve seen many UBB forums that have implemented this, that’s why I thought it’s standard now. And it’s really neat feature.

Re: timezone

By the way, you are showing local time, not timezone. What’s the difference? Your local time is 10:20AM, my local time is 21:20 military, ie 9:20PM. What’s the offset should be? You’d say 11, and it’s wrong. Here we have European daylight savings adjustments effective March-October, so the actual value is 10.

You could add the list of standard timezones with their offsets to Greenwich time and daylight saving timeframes (it’s available in Microsoft SDK under National Language API section I think) and compute the respective offsets to your timezone once a day for example. That would save me from changing the offset no less than twice a year you know! :)))

[Edit] Or at least show the current timezone or GMT offset along with local time.

Re: timezone

Hehehe…

Good point. We have the same daylight adjustments in eastern canada too.

It’ll be added in the feature requests list, but this is really low priority as I don’t see any easy way of implenting it, beside running a cron script in march and october.

I know that the box’s time is GMT so I might have to change it anyway so it would probably end up as a global change. But again, users that do not respect the daylight adjustments would get the bad time…

Will check that out!

Thanks again!

Etienne

Re: timezone

OK, I agree that that’s not the top priority. I also don’t know much about UBB programmability (I guess it’s Perl, is it?), but the most easy way to accomplish this task would in my opinion look like this.


[long offtopic]

You get the list of timezones and their GMT offsets, along with the details like daylight savings start and end values for date, time, time offset and so on. Enumerate the timezones either yourself or use standard NLS enumeration - your users will enter this enumerated value as their timezone, and your server also should have an assigned timezone.

Then, you build a table of daylight savings changes from your timezone information, where date is the key field and the other fields are timezone number, daylight saving offset time and GMT time of shift. You should update this table each day, primarily to convert timezone definitions, which could use terms like “second Sunday of February”, to specific date of the current year, and to reflect possible timezone information changes. That’s the most complex part.

Then you build another table of time offsets. The key field is timezone, and the other field is GMT time offset currently effective for that zone. You should update this table every hour, based on dates from daylight savings table, by comparing current date to the key field of daylight savings table, then comparing GMT time of shift to current GMT time and computing the offset.

Then you engage a formula to compute the respective GMT time offset for each user according to his/her timezone setting, based on the time offsets table.


The downside of this schema is that time shown will drift along with daylight savings changes, so if I post something at 11:00AM before the day of change, the next day it’ll be shown as either 10:00AM or 12:00AM. But it’s not that much of a problem, and it happens with all the file dates twice a year anyway :)

(Also there could be glitches with date shift - what happens if I post at 12:30PM at the day of daylight savings start date, and time shift is -60 minutes, then the correct display would be 11:30PM of the previous day, not the 11:30 of current day. But that’s only applies if the time/date format uses separate fields for date and time. This is not the case with Microsoft SQL products which use integral date/time value, but if MySQL uses only standard TIME and DATE fields, you’ve definitely got a problem.)

[/long offtopic]


Again, I don’t know much about UBB, it’s cooperation with MySQL, or programming skills of Keyfax staff :))) (and even about Universal Time Coordinates), so I can’t tell if it’s easy enough for you to implement this scenario. But it’s not SO much complex, I hope you’ll get someting like this done sometime.

Sorry for a long post.