Yeah, it’s not necessary to find the correct position in the thread, but the old URLs should at least redirect to the top of the thread.
I’ll add it to the todo list. Thanks for catching that!
I’ve used several Discourse forums, and have never been a fan of it. I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually, but when I went to look something up a few hours ago and google took me to a 404 page instead of the info I sought, I definitely got a sinking feeling. The end of an era, I guess.
Things have been a little bumpy so far. Like, it won’t let me log in with Firefox.
I’m getting broken link icons where many pictures should be, unless I load the noscript version of pages in a “Web 1.0” style browser. Everything seems to work well when javascript is disabled, except that I can’t log in or interact with anything.
I don’t seem to have permission to edit my old posts to fix the broken links or update outdated info, and the search function doesn’t seem to search through the parts of the posts necessary to find the broken ones… like within hrefs.
Post formatting is much, much less flexible than the old system… though I’m probably the only one who cares about that. It’ll take some serious effort to fix posts which used features the new system doesn’t have. 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.
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. That might hurt for a while.
Anyway, I know migration had to happen eventually, but I hope the old server will stay up for a bit, to allow saving some things which couldn’t be translated to the new engine.
1 Thank
Home | BudgetLightForum.com for the win, latest archive.org snapshot is from 2023-02-08
Hope that helps.
I also cannot login with my old password… (we are supposed to change it to use this site, but I have not bothered yet)
I log in with the access link email option
(under the username box in the login window)
Hey there @ToyKeeper , great to see you here.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Could you give me a few links please?
How about this?
https://budgetlightforum.com/my/preferences/profile
It will show in a popup when the user’s avatar is clicked.
2 Thanks
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:
1 Thank
@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!
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.
1 Thank
Sure, done.
Interesting… do you happen to know the IP of your ISP’s DNS so I can dig it?
1 Thank
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:
3 Thanks
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?
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
1 Thank
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 Thank
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.
1 Thank
Not exactly, but there are some analogues.
1 Thank
Hi ToyKeeper, thanks a lot for the thoughtful reply as always.
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?
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.
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.
<div align=center>
Centered normal text
## Centered heading
</div>
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.
2 Thanks
Thanks a lot. Hmm, looks like their DNS either isn’t working at all or else they don’t accept queries from outside customers.
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.
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.
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.
1 Thank