[Updated 2023-02-10] Migration complete

[sb56637]

Hey there @ToyKeeper , great to see you here.

@ToyKeeper

google took me to a 404 page instead of the info I sought

@ToyKeeper

Incoming links from other sites seem to break due to the number of posts per page being different, so links to pages within a thread often go to the wrong part of the thread or get a 404

Hmm, could you please PM me that link? Aliases have been created for all threads (i.e. https://budgetlightforum.com/node/72166) and even for their individual comments (i.e. https://budgetlightforum.com/comment/1571646#comment-1571646).

@ToyKeeper

it won’t let me log in with Firefox

I’m also using Firefox ESR on Linux, it’s definitely supported. I wonder if you’re running a custom build with a non-standard user agent? Also as you know, Discourse is Javascript-heavy and it does require it to be enabled and probably won’t work right if an extension messes with the Javascript. I understand that’s not exactly a selling point for some, but Discourse was the only forum offering by a long shot that offered the community moderation features that we depend on here, and it is what it is I guess. Later on when I have some time I’ll expand a bit more on my essay in this post about why the move was necessary and why Drupal wasn’t viable anymore.

@ToyKeeper

I don’t seem to have permission to edit my old posts to fix the broken links or update outdated info

By default everyone was imported as an untrusted user, and to prevent spammers that post “Great post!” and then go back and edit it with a spam link after a few hours it disables edits for untrusted user. The system will quickly and automatically escalate the user’s privileges with normal usage patterns, but I just raised yours manually.

@ToyKeeper

Post formatting is much, much less flexible than the old system

Unfortunately true. It does still accept straight HTML posts, but it’s more restrictive. Also a necessary evil to prevent XSS and simple boneheads that break the forum layout with some janky script or CSS.

@ToyKeeper

fix posts which used features the new system doesn’t have

Could you give me a few links please?

@ToyKeeper

Also looks like there are no signatures any more, and while I mostly won’t miss those, it was really handy having a few useful links there

How about this?
https://budgetlightforum.com/my/preferences/profile
It will show in a popup when the user’s avatar is clicked.

[dave1010]

Nice work on the migration!

Whether or not Discourse is people’s favourite, it’s very good to know that it’s being looked after by @sb56637 and is now more future proof.

If anyone’s missing threads they subscribed too, most of mine are in this search result of threads with over 1000 posts:

https://budgetlightforum.com/search?q=%20min_posts%3A1000

[koef3 (LED tester)]

@sb56637 Please add the ability for me to edit the migrated posts. The formatting of my LED test text is sometimes a little bit broken (no centered text or something which affects the clarity of the texts) and I had to fix it. In addition, I need the ability to add updates or new informations to existing tests also from older dates. Thanks!

[idleprocess]

Still some apparent DNS propagation issues. My ISP’s DNS doesn’t look to be up to speed while 1.1.1.1 / 8.8.8.8 seem to be pointing correctly.

[sb56637]

@koef3

Please add the ability for me to edit the migrated posts

Sure, done.

@idleprocess

Still some apparent DNS propagation issues. My ISP’s DNS doesn’t look to be up to speed while 1.1.1.1 / 8.8.8.8 seem to be pointing correctly.

Interesting… do you happen to know the IP of your ISP’s DNS so I can dig it?

[roostre]

@roostre

Is there a way to include a URL in a post as just a “clickable text link” without it becoming a hyperlink that displays a preview of the URL’s contents?

FYI - Solved with some experimentation.

Below are some results using the URL to one of my BLF posts with various options:

If you use the (Insert Hyperlink) function while composing your post and paste the URL into the “Paste a URL or type to search topics” box of the pop-up window for the (Insert Hyperlink) function (also note that you do not need to enter any text into the “optional title” box unless you want something different than the URL to be shown in your saved post) you get a “clickable text link” that looks like this:

https://budgetlightforum.com/t/easy-method-for-setting-the-anduril-2-voltage-correction-factor/69798

If you paste the URL into your post on a new line and also insert a space character at the beginning of the line before the URL (or paste the URL anywhere within your post with text on both sides of it) you get the embedded “title tag” of the URL which is also “clickable” that looks like this when there is a space character at the beginning of the line before the URL:

Easy Method for Setting the Anduril 2 "Voltage Correction Factor"

or looks like this when there is text on both sides of the URL:

some text before the URL Easy Method for Setting the Anduril 2 "Voltage Correction Factor" and some text after the URL

If you just paste the URL into your post on it’s own line you get the embedded “title tag” of the URL which is also “clickable” along with a preview of the URL that looks like this:

Easy Method for Setting the Anduril 2 "Voltage Correction Factor"

I prefer a "Voltage Correction Factor" that allows the "Battery Check" function to blink out 3.7 when the battery voltage range is between 3.70 V and 3.80 V (or as close as I can get to that). I calibrate at 3.7 V since it is near the middle of the typical voltage range (instead of at the extreme low or high end which could cause unexpected inaccuracies at the end opposite from the calibrated end) and I usually have a stored battery at the exact voltage required for this method. The available …

[koef3 (LED tester)]

@sb56637

Sure, done.

Thank you very much, it’s working.

Just one another question: is it possible to center the text via bbcode/Html or in the editor?

[idleprocess]

@sb56637

Interesting… do you happen to know the IP of your ISP’s DNS so I can dig it?

Oh man - I remove that every time so much as think about it and forgot to update the router’s DHCP settings last reconfig. Frontier looks to be claiming…

Primary DNS: 74.40.74.40
Secondary DNS: 74.40.74.41

[ToyKeeper]

@sb56637

Hmm, could you please PM me that link?

It’s the same issue SammysHP mentioned, where old URLs with “?page=N” on the end return “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.” This, unfortunately, includes a lot of incoming links from search engines and such.

Discourse supports page-based navigation URLs, but to make it hit the right destination, it would need to multiply the page number by the old site’s posts per page value, then maybe divide by the new site’s value to figure out the new page, or calculate an approximate post number and redirect to that.

@sb56637

I’m also using Firefox ESR on Linux, it’s definitely supported. I wonder if you’re running a custom build with a non-standard user agent?

It’s a pretty vanilla Firefox. It looks like Debian 10’s version is unsupported, but Debian 11’s version works… so older versions can get rejected even if they probably have the necessary features.

@sb56637

why the move was necessary and why Drupal wasn’t viable anymore

Yeah, it’s amazing you kept Drupal going for so long. People (including me) are going to be unhappy about losing the platform they spent the past decade on, but I understand why it had to happen.

@sb56637

@ToyKeeper

fix posts which used features the new system doesn’t have

Could you give me a few links please?

It’s just posts where I used HTML for formatting, like divs and tables and css and other things the old forum passed through raw but the new forum removes or escapes to avoid potential abuse.

For example, old site:

… and the same post in the new site looks pretty different because the formatting got stripped out:

I wouldn’t expect fancy stuff like that to translate, but it looks like even relatively simple markup like headings and tables are blocked too. Before…

… and after:

So I might try to reformat some of those to fit the new engine’s feature set.

I thought I’d have to rewrite every post with an image in it, but I checked from an outside IP address and the images work there… it looks like the broken image links only affect me and only on an internal network. So I’ll fix that internally instead. It’s probably just different handling of http vs https hrefs between the old and new engines.

Anyway, with an entry in /etc/hosts, the old site still responds… so I can save old stuff that way as long as it keeps running for a while.

[ToyKeeper]

BTW, is there anything like the old “My Subscriptions” page? I haven’t found a function yet which does that (i.e. lists all the threads I’m subscribed to, in order of most recent updates, ideally with a count of how many comments are unread).

With ~1100 threads subscribed and at least 100 that I’m behind on, not having the list makes it hard to catch up. But perhaps I just haven’t found it yet.

[phouton]

@ToyKeeper

is there anything like the old “My Subscriptions” page?

Not exactly, but there are some analogues.

Any way to go back to the old navigation?

Did anyone figure this out? The subscribed topics could not be imported. However, you can get pretty close with the advanced search feature (hamburger button in the search icon). For example, this basically shows me a list of my previously subscribed posts, since it automatically subscribed me to the threads I posted in: [Screenshot from 2023-02-11 10-45-42] There are quite a few other useful options and filters there in the advanced search function, and note that it also works for search…

Any way to go back to the old navigation?

As far as I can tell, the old “subscriptions” are now “tracking” or “watching”. You can enable these (at least on mobile) by a dropdown on the bottom left once you scroll to the bottom of the thread. I’ve also found a way to view all tracked or watched by going to Preferences → Categories. I wonder if there’s an easier way to get to the tracking and watched lists? I guess I can bookmark these URLs: https://budgetlightforum.com/latest?state=tracking https://budgetlightforum.com/latest?state=w…

[sb56637]

Hi ToyKeeper, thanks a lot for the thoughtful reply as always.

@ToyKeeper

It’s the same issue SammysHP mentioned, where old URLs with “?page=N” on the end return “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.” This, unfortunately, includes a lot of incoming links from search engines and such.

Thanks a lot to @ToyKeeper and @SammysHP for catching that. I applied a fix that seems to be working to strip the ?page=N part of the query. Could you both please test a few incoming links again?

@ToyKeeper

It’s a pretty vanilla Firefox. It looks like Debian 10’s version is unsupported, but Debian 11’s version works

So Firefox ESR 91? As best I can tell, Debian 10 has upgraded to Firefox ESR 102, which is the same version I’m running on Debian 11.

@ToyKeeper

I wouldn’t expect fancy stuff like that to translate, but it looks like even relatively simple markup like headings and tables are blocked too

Ouch, that example there is indeed a mess. I used Pandoc to convert HTML->HTML (basically to clean up some terribly messy output that the old “Advanced Post Editor” generated / accepted from paste-ins) and Textile->Markdown, depending on the original format of the post. But it apparently got confused on that post and it escaped everything with \backslashes. Pandoc normally seemed to handle tables well in my testing, but I obviously didn’t check every post. The good news is that I just edited it and copy/pasted in the original table and it looks like it worked. Can you find any other examples like that? Sorry to give you additional work, I know you’re still trying to dig out from some things too.

[sb56637]

@koef3

Just one another question: is it possible to center the text via bbcode/Html or in the editor?

<div align=center>

Centered normal text

## Centered heading

</div>

Centered text

Centered heading

---

It looks like BBcode already is or can be supported too, but I’m not sure yet. There is even a more advanced post editor toolbar with alignment buttons that I could install. I’ll look into it a bit later after I dig out from some other tasks here.

[sb56637]

Thanks a lot. Hmm, looks like their DNS either isn’t working at all or else they don’t accept queries from outside customers.

[ToyKeeper]

@sb56637

I applied a fix that seems to be working to strip the ?page=N part of the query. Could you both please test a few incoming links again?

It appears to work now, meaning it goes to post #1 of the given thread. Not ideal, when the incoming link was aiming for page 394 in a very long thread, but it’s an improvement from the previous behavior.

@sb56637

So Firefox ESR 91? As best I can tell, Debian 10 has upgraded to Firefox ESR 102, which is the same version I’m running on Debian 11.

In this case, it was Firefox ESR 78. So roughly 2.5 years old. It has been pretty reliable whenever a site doesn’t work in Chrome, but it looks like I just found the first exception to that rule.

@sb56637

I just edited it and copy/pasted in the original table and it looks like it worked. Can you find any other examples like that?

Thanks!

I’m sure I’ve got plenty of other posts to clean up. Sometimes I got pretty, uh, “creative” with formatting on the old site. But I don’t know yet which posts they are. For now, I’m mostly saving some things from the old server before it gets shut off… and then I’ll remove my DNS override and focus more on the new site.

I haven’t figured out how to get the new search function to match the keywords which would take me directly to affected posts. Like, “style=” returns 6 matches for me on the new site, or 500+ on the old site. But since the old site’s search does it pretty easily, perhaps I can search on the old site and fix on the new site.

[SammysHP]

@ToyKeeper

Not ideal, when the incoming link was aiming for page 394 in a very long thread, but it’s an improvement from the previous behavior.

Honestly, what does page 394 even mean. Just change the number of posts on a page and it will be completely meaningless.

@ToyKeeper

In this case, it was Firefox ESR 78. So roughly 2.5 years old.

Ancient. I’ve updated my Firefox 68 on Android as well, though.

@ToyKeeper

Like, “style=” returns 6 matches for me on the new site, or 500+ on the old site.

Maybe bacause it just got filtered out during the migration because style attributes are no longer allowed.

[ToyKeeper]

@SammysHP

Honestly, what does page 394 even mean. Just change the number of posts on a page and it will be completely meaningless.

When not logged in (i.e. what search engines see), the site used a default of 30 comments per page. The 394 figure was an actual google result for the thing I searched for earlier, and it goes to comment number 30 * 394, or a page containing comments 11820 to 11850 in the target thread.

With the site’s history of long and meandering threads, and search engines’ tendency to index by page instead of by post, the page number means quite a bit.

@SammysHP

Ancient.

I know it feels like it has been forever since 2020, because covid made time weird, but… it really wasn’t that long ago. This version of Firefox was brand new when I started my current X11 login session. It seems really strange that a browser (especially an extended support release) would have a shorter lifespan than my xterms.

@SammysHP

Maybe bacause it just got filtered out during the migration because style attributes are no longer allowed.

It wasn’t filtered out during migration. If I search on the old site and load the comments on the new site, the markup is still there. It’s just not showing up in search results, and isn’t rendered during page views. I searched for style attributes specifically because the new site doesn’t honor them, meaning they need to be adapted to something compatible with the new site. I suspect the search function is searching on a stripped-down version of the text, which means it omits exactly the types of things I’m searching for.

[sb56637]

@ToyKeeper

With the site’s history of long and meandering threads, and search engines’ tendency to index by page instead of by post, the page number means quite a bit.

Right. I guess the saving grace is that most human-created links to specific information here were either referring to /node/N (the first post in the thread) or to a specific reply /comment/N#comment-N , and we have permalink redirects set up directly to all of those. And if a human search user does hit a /node/N?page=X link it will at least take them to the correct topic, and from there they can search on the page using the Discourse in-topic search even if it’s buried hundreds of posts in. I agree with @SammysHP that a link to a page of 30 posts wasn’t very specific either, and it still required on-page searching to find the correct post.

Fun fact regarding those Drupal ?page=N links: There was a bug in Drupal for the administrator user, which could see unpublished “removed” posts in a thread, and that messed up the post numbering. So I would get a tip from somebody about “post #89” or even a direct link http://budgetlightforum.com/comment/N#comment-N and it would either take me to the wrong post, or else the last post visible on a page was actually not the last post. I usually resorted to manually changing the URL query parameter to /node/N?page=999 just to see all the comments in a thread.

@ToyKeeper

It wasn’t filtered out during migration.

There was some custom regexp that I ran on the posts during import, in addition to being passed through Pandoc. Here’s that part of the code:

https://pastebin.mozilla.org/RZYa28L4

[koef3 (LED tester)]

@sb56637

There is even a more advanced post editor toolbar with alignment buttons that I could install.

I would appreciate this, because for me more features in formatting are always better

To be honest, the old WYSIWYG editor was not so bad in terms of features and formatting options (ok, it was admittedly also not really nice to look at but at least it works fine) - if the new software here can achieve the same featureset this would be perfect.

Despite the unfamiliar operation and the very different appearance, I am happy about the change of the software, especially because of the easier operation on smartphones. Thank you for your efforts and the work to migrate the forum to a new software!

[sb56637]

Thanks a lot @koef3 for your kind words!

@koef3

To be honest, the old WYSIWYG editor was not so bad in terms of features and formatting options (ok, it was admittedly also not really nice to look at but at least it works fine) - if the new software here can achieve the same featureset this would be perfect

It won’t be exactly the same feature set because the old software was extremely permissive, to the point of allowing scripts and HTML and CSS that would break the entire thread. Fortunately it didn’t happen often, but this forum software is more restrictive in that sense. We’ll see what we can do though to add a few more features where possible.