Oops! Fixed now. Thanks for letting me know.
Fun Facts:
- 11 user groups
- 98 permissions per user group
- 97 total boards on forum (not all public, obviously)
That works out to 11 * 98 * 97 =
104,566 individual permissions. That's a
lot of checkboxes...
Current UPAR (Upgrade Permission Accuracy Rating):
99.999%
I think this is because the old forum just plopped the image you gave it on the server, and displayed it resized via CSS if necessary.
The new server actually makes multiple sizes of the image, optimizes it, and saves those versions. Usually, that means animated GIFs become single-frame GIFs.
The preview works probably because it's just using the local image file from your puter and displaying it via JavaScript. This is more or less what the SOTT image uploader does. IOW, the user-friendly aspect ("Yay! I see my image!") does not always correspond to the behind-the-scenes stuff the server is doing.
Well, strictly speaking, we could achieve knowledge transfer with everything written down on papyrus or something.
The "short" version is that the old forum software was too old. It didn't fully support newer versions of PHP, and thus we would be in trouble. PHP 5.6 is only officially supported until the end of this year.
So then I went on the SMF forum, and I found that the developers were bickering with each other and basically acting like little kids. The probability that SMF would release their new version seemed to drop to 0.
Plus, the old forum didn't support mobile devices. This was not easy to do myself. On SOTT, 50% of readers are on smartphones or tablets. NOT supporting mobile devices fully is a bad idea in this day and age.
Just to get HTTPS working on the old forum, I had to hack it. I had to hack a
lot of things to keep it running nicely because it wasn't being kept up-to-date by the developers.
Then, there were many problems with the old forum, technically speaking. It was a hodge-podge of different chunks of code trying to work together. It
did work, but the problem was that any change usually caused trouble. For example, the ban system on the old forum was poorly done, so it caused a high server load. So, SMF said, "Here, have a Warning system!" But that system itself was also poorly done, and it had its own problems. So the only solution was rewrite everything from scratch. But, as I said, the SMF people can't seem to do that because they're busy fighting amongst themselves.
There are many other considerations... For example, support for the utf8mb4 character set - which doesn't just give emojis, but fully supports various languages and characters and that sort of thing. That's the new standard.
Or: The old forum's database structure was piss-poor. There are better ways to do stuff these days. The old forum's search was poorly done, but the new forum search works a
lot better. And with an appropriate amount of money and at least one extra server, it can be made to work even better. Room to grow!
The old forum required 6GB of disk space to store attachments and avatars, whereas the new forum only needs 4GB. When you have multiple backups on multiple servers for multiple web sites that we pay for
via donations, storage space counts! Or how about the new forum being far better at keeping spammers out, which means less work for mods to keep the house clean, and more time for posting good stuff?
Finally, SMF was free, which was nice. XenForo (this forum) is paid. Their support community is very good, even tho documentation is sparse at the moment because they're busy fixing bugs after the initial November 2017 release of XF 2.0.0. XF 1.5 was basically world-famous (in the online forum world) for being the only forum software out there that didn't suck horribly in one way or another.
Now, I realize most people probably don't care at all about any of that, and that's perfectly fine, because they don't have to. But I do!
So, rest assured that I don't like change any more than anyone else. I just don't like it for very different reasons...
And Finally...
It seems we simply must have some more themes... Altho at this point, I cannot give a time frame.
Once the forum is stable, my next Big Project is a help system for SOTT editors. No one can ever remember all the things it can do because it simply does too much! I have a solution for that...
Probably intermixed with that project, I'll crank out some themes when my brain needs a rest...
