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Global Website Update & Changelog Thread

The forums have been upgraded to XenForo 1.5! This is a major new release that includes a bunch of new features, along with a host of bug fixes and improvements.

The new features in XenForo 1.5 include:
...and more.

I'm aware that a few website features have not been working, even prior to this upgrade. We're working diligently to get them functional ASAP!

As always, if you encounter any problems, please report them here. Thanks!
 
The forums have been updated to XenForo 1.5.1. This is a minor update that resolves bugs.

Some of the bugs fixed in 1.5.1 include:
  • When loading more profile post comments, show the deleted placeholder for deleted comments instead of it being expanded by default.
  • When navigating to an anchor link, adjust the scroll position to account for the fixed height header.
  • Fix for a server error in certain situations relating to user mentions which are too long.
  • Fix for some tags incorrectly receiving a weighting of 8 in the tag cloud.
  • Fix for improper touch device detection on IE Mobile and Microsoft Edge browsers.
  • Adjust permission rebuilding actions to avoid timeouts when possible.
  • When copying posts from a thread, do not rebuild the discussion counters for the source thread.
  • Fix for an issue which may see a new user not receive notification of their Welcome message.
  • Fix a situation where an invalid character could be displayed when stripping BB code from content.
  • Fix for incorrect multi-column display in certain situations in Chrome.
  • Changed the Facebook media site code to display in Facebook video format rather than post format.
  • Fix for alerts about profile post comments generated before the upgrade to 1.5.0 displaying incorrectly.
  • Prevent an "array to string conversion" error when logging user changes for custom fields which have changed type.
  • Workaround for an issue with some versions of iOS which prevented the search input from being focused on the first tap.
  • Limit the amount of ignored users imported to 1000 to prevent data length issues.
  • Ensure that following and follower lists only display the "more" button when needed.
Additionally, the issue with the Live Streams feature of our site has been resolved. You can now share your Twitch or Google live channel right here!
 
Just a heads up that the forums will be undergoing some maintenance this weekend. I will be updating the forum skin to the latest version as well as installing a new version of the portal addon. (The current version is an old free version and is no longer supported by the developer.)

I expect there to be little to no downtime during these upgrades. The homepage might look a bit weird while tweaking the new portal, but other than that the forums should behave as expected.

Thank you for understanding and a special word of appreciation to our Donators who have helped keep the site going for all these years!

EDIT: Upgrades are complete!
 
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New portal has been installed! Tweaking is ongoing but one of the fun new features is that you can rearrange the widgets on the homepage and forum index however you want. Instructions on how to do that are forthcoming. :)
 
The new events system is live! Find it under Calendar tab at the top of the page. It features the ability to create a new event for any particular day by simply clicking the + button for that date, and I know this will make a lot of people happy: FINALLY PROPER TIMEZONE SUPPORT. Just create the event according to the local time in your area, set your time zone, and the calendar will automatically convert your event's time and date to the correct time based on each user's timezone setting on their forum profile.

Sadly, though the addon is a new version of the old events system written by the same author, it is a complete rewrite and there is no way to import all of the existing events. I will leave the old events calendar active for a while (still available under the Events tab) however I am disabling the ability to create new events under the old system. If you are a regular event organizer please re-create your event under the new Calendar system. The old system will be turned off on June 1.

Thanks and please let me know if you have any issues!
 
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So I had to disable the Streams and Media addons as apparently they've been broken for a while...

Just a quick show of hands here: The last media upload was in mid-2015 and we have stream embedding enabled in posts on the forums. Did anyone find either of these addons valuable to the point where it would be worth investing in a paid upgrade to make them functional again? You can use the post ratings in this post to vote: Click Agree if you're fine living without them. Click Disagree if you absolutely can not live without one of them.
 
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Apologies for the recent downtime over the past day or so. There was a complex, wide-scale DDoS attack that brought down much of the infrastructure supporting not just our web host, but many other hosting providers as well. Thankfully, our provider (of which your generous donations have allowed us to continue paying) has been working tirelessly to mitigate the attack.

Service has since been restored and stabilized, and further attacks should be deflected entirely. Thanks so much for being patient. Keep Calm and Slay On!
 
The shoutbox is temporarily disabled as it was using up an inordinate amount of bandwidth (over 95% of the site's overall usage). It will return once I've determined the cause.
 
Elal said:
If anyone is interested, there is a writeup on the downtime from the providers perspective here:
https://ns1.com/blog/how-we-responded-to-last-weeks-major-multi-faceted-ddos-attacks

(at least I'm assuming this is the chain, these attacks have been felt very widely).
Click to expand...
Yup, that is exactly what happened!

In other news, I have enabled CloudFlare protection for our site, and turned the shoutbox back on. Will be keeping a close eye on bandwidth usage to see if that resolves the issue. :)
 
The shoutbox is off again. It's still eating up an incredible amount of bandwidth for something that sees maybe one or two comments a day. I'll be looking into an alternative, as that's just ludicrous.
 
LadyToon said:
Just weird it's making problems now, been running for so long without.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's very odd. I have a sneaking suspicion as to the cause but won't be able to confirm for a couple days, which is when our bandwidth cap resets.
 
Apologies again for the downtime. To further reduce server load, I had set up the site to use CloudFlare, which caches data and helps prevent DDoS attacks. A configuration error made the site unreachable for a period, and it may intermittently fail to load for a little bit while the changes propagate throughout the internet.

Additionally, thank you to @MadLyric and @Frank-Wisdom for reporting an issue with the new events system. It seems in the process of upgrading to the new version, some data from the old event system was occupying the same database space, and only after completely turning off the old system as planned on June 1 did a problem manifest itself in which no new events could be created.

Sadly, I couldn't repair or salvage the corrupted tables, so it required flushing the database and starting from scratch. Unfortunately, this means event coordinators will need to recreate their events. I'm very, very sorry about this this, but hopefully this should prevent any further issues going forward.

Thank you so much for understanding!
 
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Thank you for the update. I'm glad to know we can still move forward with Event scheduling. Also, thanks for the hard work keeping this site up and running :)
 
Forums have been updated to XenForo 1.5.15. Security and compatibility stuff.

Also enabled friendly URLs as we prepare to upgrade to XF 2.0. What are friendly URLs? The address to this page used to be:
Code: 
https://lomsglobal.com/threads.php?website-update-changelog-thread.50/page-11

Now it's:
Code: 
https://lomsglobal.com/threads/website-update-changelog-thread.50/page-11

Notice the difference? It's friendlier!
 
The forums have been upgraded to XenForo 2.0!

This is a completely rebuilt version of XenForo with lots of great new features. Sadly, any custom styles and addons for 1.0 are not compatible. Some of the features of our site had to be disabled for now until things get updated. However, we do have a working events calendar addon!

Please post any feedback or suggestions you have here for what you'd like to see added back in, or any questions about how things work under 2.0. :illuminati:
 
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