New Forum Software, Same Great Content

cyberscribe

cyberscribe

Senior Associate, Next Action Associates
Dear Forum Users,

We have switched the underlying software that powers these forums. User accounts and forum posts remain unchanged. We have also made sure the RSS feeds are still at the same location, however direct links to forum posts may have changed.

The default posting time display is GMT. Registered users can display posting times based on their own time zone by logging in, clicking on "Edit My Profile" (at top) then "Edit Options", scrolling down and editing the time zone preferences. For more information on using the forums, please read the FAQ:

http://www.gettingthingsdone.com/forum/faq.php?faq=vb_faq

Hopefully, you will find new features you like. If you have any thoughts or suggestions about the "new" forum, please post them to this thread.

Cheers,
Robert
 
M

mochant

Guest
Smart move

Excellent choice - this is the forums engine I use and recommend to anyone interested in hosting conversation spaces. The template adaptation looks great!
 
R

rdcottle

Guest
Which software is it?

Just curious. It was phpBB I believe. What did you switch to and why?
 
T

ThomasDerwin

Registered
f.y.i registration now required to post

Just discovered one change from the old forum: registration is now required to post.

No big deal, just surprizing because the old forum had words to the effect that "registration is not required to play in any way on the forum", so thought it should be mentioned.

Looks like the new software is "vBulletin" (www.vbulletin.com).

And congratulations on the successful migration of all prior threads. It's no small accomplishment to move data intact during software conversions.

Thanks for a great forum that's a daily treat to visit,
Tom
 
S

spectecGTD

Guest
I like the new look & feel. Very impressive.
Just curious, is my "Senior Member" status due to my length of time on the BB or a function of the number of "senior moments" I demonstrate?
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
I'm not usually opposed to change, but unfortunately this new software is quite frustrating for me, as it seems the RSS feeds now just include a snippet of the posts instead of the full content. So I have to A) try to decide if a post is interesting from the first sentence or two, and B) click to view the full post in the forum (switch contexts!) if it appears to be. Is there a way around this??? Can you switch it to a full RSS feed (entire text of posts), or is there a different feed I should subscribe to now?
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
The RSS situation is even worse than I had originally thought - not only does it not show full post content, but it no longer includes replies in the RSS feeds. Basically, I can't use RSS to monitor the forum at all - this will be yet another site I need to actually browse to on a regular basis. Not very GTD-friendly!

Please, see if there's anything that can be done to allow full posts & replies to be included in RSS feeds!
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
Ok, sorry to reply-spam - but this forum is such a valuable resource to me and these RSS changes are just driving me crazy! Anyway, an update - I tried all of the feed links listed in the FAQ, in the header of the site, etc - found that http://www.davidco.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2 does include the full text of posts, but it's rather unreadable because it does not include any line breaks or other formatting. Long posts become one huge paragraph! Plus, it still doesn't include any replies in the feed - just the first post of new topics.

If I have some time later tonight I'll do some searches to see if there are any plugins for this forum software or any other solutions to improve the RSS feeds, and post any links I find.
 
A

allgeek

Guest
I finally went ahead and registered! Anyway, didn't have much time to search, but found this:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=69834&highlight=RSS

Sounds like a possible starting point; although from the description I'm afraid it might include the entire thread in the feed every time a post is replied to; not just the new reply. I really liked the old way the feeds worked - you just got an update with every new post or reply. And they were formatted properly :)

I've never worked with vBulletin before; but it's just PHP, and it shouldn't be difficult to modify the RSS feed behavior even if a standard plugin/hack isn't already out there that fits the bill.

DavidCo web dudes/dudettes: if fixing these RSS feeds just gets put on a Someday/Maybe list, I certainly wouldn't mind taking a crack at it - I'm a developer myself with some decent PHP experience (though it's not my main language). Just let me know!
 
U

Unregistered

Guest
Privacy?

New forum is pretty. I do have a question, though. I thought that in the old forum, we could select a privacy option to keep our presence in the forum private. We'd normally be identified, if we were logged on here, but could opt out. I can't find out how to do the same thing here, to keep my registered name from appearing in the "Who's Online" roster, so I have logged out. Are my perceptions accurate? If there IS a privacy option, can someone say where to find it?

Thanks.
 
U

unregistered

Guest
Pleased with printing capability

I can print without any setup changes.

Printing a single message is easy and foolproof.
 
J

jmarkey

Guest
I need a little help here. If anyone figures it out, can they please post the solution? I want to be able to read the entire text of new posts along with their replies in the RSS feed. I'm subscribed to RSS, which seems to be generating no posts, and RSS2, which is only giving me a handful of complete posts and no replies.

allgeek said:
I finally went ahead and registered! Anyway, didn't have much time to search, but found this:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=69834&highlight=RSS

Sounds like a possible starting point; although from the description I'm afraid it might include the entire thread in the feed every time a post is replied to; not just the new reply. I really liked the old way the feeds worked - you just got an update with every new post or reply. And they were formatted properly :)

I've never worked with vBulletin before; but it's just PHP, and it shouldn't be difficult to modify the RSS feed behavior even if a standard plugin/hack isn't already out there that fits the bill.

DavidCo web dudes/dudettes: if fixing these RSS feeds just gets put on a Someday/Maybe list, I certainly wouldn't mind taking a crack at it - I'm a developer myself with some decent PHP experience (though it's not my main language). Just let me know!
Click to expand...
 
J

jmarkey

Guest
Okay. I've got the feed working now (the way I want it to). If you want to read the full post with replies (i.e., view the web page), subscribe to: http://www.davidco.com/forum/external.php?type=rss
I had to delete my subscription to the old feed and to the RSS2 feed in Thunderbird to get the RSS to work.

Below is the frequently asked questions stuff about RSS feeds:

The administrator may have enabled RSS syndication, this allows you to view newly created threads in guest viewable forums without visiting the board.

The feeds are currently provided in two formats, RSS and RSS v2. The differences are as follows:

* RSS 0.91 - This feed is based on a standard written by netscape and provides a link and the title of the thread.
http://www.davidco.com/forum/external.php?type=rss
* RSS 2.0 - This feed contains title, author, date and the contents of the first post of the thread.
http://www.davidco.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2

To add this to MyYahoo click here.

The forums to which this applies can also be limited to specific guest viewable forums by adding another paramater to the URL containing the forumids as follows:
http://www.davidco.com/forum/external.php?type=rss2&forumids=123

If you would like the content to be generated for multiple forums you can seperate the forumids by commas.
 
cyberscribe

cyberscribe

Senior Associate, Next Action Associates
RSS Redux

The RSS feeds have been completely rewritten to:

1) show the most recent post in a thread
2) display line breaks correctly
 
TesTeq

TesTeq

Registered
Incomplete Members List.

The Members List contains the recently registered members only.
TesTeq
 
J

jreyes1958

Guest
assorted problems

the rss feed seems to be missing some posts ?
also i'm trying to resubscribe to the rss feed using newsgator and there doesn't appear to be a link at the rss feed -- at least a visible link so the subscription fails. hope that makes sense. you can click thru to it, but the rss reader croaks as it says there isn't a link.
 
J

jmarkey

Guest
It appears that the new RSS feeds do not work the same way as the old ones. I am using RSS1 right now. When I view the message, I get the original message plus any replies that have been posted up to the time that I view the message, but I do not get additional feeds when new replies are posted. If that is the way it's going to work, I will probably stop using the RSS feed, because I like to read the follow up messages.
 
A

allgeek

Guest
Yes, the RSS feeds are better (line breaks! woo!), but the replies still aren't coming through as others have mentioned. Maybe I just need to make this forum a part of a weekly review, and actually come to the site, instead of monitoring it with my daily reading via RSS - perhaps I'm spending too much time thinking about & tweaking the system, and not enough doing it :) But; it really would be useful if we could get the old RSS feed functionality restored, including all replies in feeds as well.
 
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