Author Topic: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.  (Read 27686 times)

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Offline namida

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Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« on: December 15, 2014, 09:48:18 AM »
Well, between the lack of administrator existance and the recent Russian spam, it seemed like time to move again, so... here's the new forum! You may have to re-register, sorry; first, try logging in with your old username, and the password you had around January 2014 (not your new one if you changed it since then). If you see you do have an account here (eg. by checking the member list) but can't recall your password from that time, feel free to contact an admin (myself, geoo or ccexplore) for help recovering it; alternatively you can create a new account if you prefer.

At the moment this doesn't have a very lemming-y look, but I'll be fixing that over the next few days. :)



Geoo and Clam have retained their roles as staff members here (with geoo moving up to administrator), with me obviously also as an admin. Aside from that, we have ccexplore as a new administrator, and Akseli as a new moderator. Proxima also retains position as board-specific moderator for the Challenges board, while Simon and Tsyu have moderator access on the Lix and SuperLemmini boards respectively (due to being the creators of those projects).

Prob Lem was temporarily a moderator to help with one issue, but he has stated he doesn't want a full-time moderator position. Nonetheless, a huge thanks to him in helping dig out the last few missing attachments (as well as for the very nice Lemmings-related creations he always makes and posts, of course)!
« Last Edit: March 11, 2015, 12:26:08 PM by namida »
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #1 on: December 15, 2014, 12:01:29 PM »
Also, just for reference: Passing a security check is needed the first time you post, and when sending a PM if you have less than 5 posts 1 post. After that, it won't give you those anymore.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2015, 12:26:31 PM by namida »
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline Prob Lem

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #2 on: December 15, 2014, 12:41:43 PM »
Heya namida! As stated on the other forum, I've come on over to get myself registered here.

How many times have these migrations taken place, over the years, then? I've heard of a few of them, but of course I've never seen one!

Offline Simon

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #3 on: December 15, 2014, 02:01:00 PM »
Very good, a 2015 instance of LF to cultivate.

The migrations in the past were always due to board death, not to admin AWOLness. Let's see whether the users migrate. The 2009-2014 instance is usable still. No proper spoiler tag, wrong board order, ..., don't deter immediately most of the users. The domain lemmingsforums.com is strong on search engines, but good luck in contacting Adam and pointing it here.

Now I can get all my nitpicking about the 2009-2014 design in here later. :-)

-- Simon

Offline geoo

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #4 on: December 15, 2014, 02:49:02 PM »
I discourage from moving discussions from the old forum to here at this moment, I really think the database migration is something worth pursuing and having actual content in this forum will just make it a lot harder to do. There's no rush to migrate, it's just good to have this as a place to go to if the actual forum goes down.

Offline Prob Lem

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #5 on: December 15, 2014, 02:57:38 PM »
I discourage from moving discussions from the old forum to here at this moment, I really think the database migration is something worth pursuing and having actual content in this forum will just make it a lot harder to do.
Agreed. With any luck all of this can be resolved quickly and painlessly...

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #6 on: December 15, 2014, 10:00:48 PM »
I may very well be able to bring the existing posts without having to lose any new ones on here, but I'll look into that later today.
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline Prob Lem

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #7 on: December 15, 2014, 10:22:49 PM »
Does that mean you guys have the post database from the "old" forum now?

Offline Clam

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #8 on: December 16, 2014, 06:52:08 AM »
Well I guess this had to be done sooner or later. Can't have a forum without an admin :\

Here's hoping the transition and archiving go smoothly.

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #9 on: December 17, 2014, 10:09:16 AM »
It's looking like I might have to custom-make something to archive the old one; the HTML archiving software I was trying seems to be more made for static sites, and doesn't do well with the attachments at all. Firstly, logging into an account is very tricky and not stable, so I'd have to get an admin to turn on attachment downloads by guests. Even then, it doesn't seem to preserve their filenames correctly.

I'll have to look into what can be done for this at some point - of course, assuming we can't get server access. Geoo has mentioned that he's contacted Adam so we'll see what comes of that. But one way or another, I am completely determined to at least get *some* form of backup of the current forum, including attachments.
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #10 on: December 18, 2014, 10:19:13 AM »
Alright, I'm going to be able to get the existing posts and attachments for sure. :D I already have them all on my PC; just have to write a program to parse them, then import them to this forum.

Also, you might've noticed the URL changed (and old URLs automatically redirected) to lemforums.neolemmix.com instead of lemforums.nfshost.com. I did this to test if it'd be very complicated to move to a new URL (in case we can get the lemmingsforums.com domain, or register a new one) and it's very simple with no issues whatsoever. :)
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #11 on: December 21, 2014, 09:19:24 AM »
As you've almost certianly noticed, the old posts from both LemmingsWelt and IsaMedia have been added to this forum.
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #12 on: December 23, 2014, 12:08:06 PM »
So, I finally got around to adding the current Lemmings emoticons. Enjoy! :)
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline Clam

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #13 on: December 31, 2014, 09:56:01 AM »
The posts-per-day is a bit funky for users who registered here before the move. I'm at 140 per day - maybe I need to put the "Spammer" back in my name :D

Offline ccexplore

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« Reply #14 on: January 04, 2015, 03:33:46 PM »
As you can plainly see, my spinning hamster avatar doesn't seem to animate.  I keep trying to set it to the "specify by URL" option (http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/etc/hamster-3.gif), but it seems like the forum keep insisting on turning it into an upload or something, and loses the animated GIF-ness in the process? :XD:

[update: thanks, works now]
« Last Edit: January 04, 2015, 04:25:57 PM by ccexplore »

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #15 on: January 04, 2015, 03:37:43 PM »
Try again now. :)
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #16 on: January 04, 2015, 04:56:50 PM »
I realize this is probably a problem unique to me :XD:, but I'm not a fan of seeing my own avatar in the header section of the forums (ie. near where the forum logo is located).  Any chance of not doing that (just like in the old forums) or failing that, have a per-user option to turn off displaying it there?

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #17 on: January 04, 2015, 05:06:18 PM »
Working on the PMs at the moment; once I'm done with that I'll look into it.
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #18 on: January 04, 2015, 05:12:30 PM »
I'm reviewing some topics on the challenge board that were imported from the old lemmingswelt forum, and found that some of the posts' contents seem to be partially missing or otherwise not properly/fully imported.  For example, compare the following:

http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=263 (what was imported)

http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/lemmingswelt/forums/?topic=1117597280 (archive of what they should be)

Obviously the first post of the topic is affected but it's probably not the only one.  I found another one on page 2, and there are probably more but I haven't looked further yet.

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #19 on: January 04, 2015, 05:17:12 PM »
Ouch. o_O At this point, I'm not sure how practical it would be to restore them automatically (that's assuming they're not simply broken in the database backup I have); it might be possible by comparing exact timestamps, usernames and subject times to identify posts. It might come down to that it's simpler to do it manually, though that'd be quite a time-consuming task, especially given that there's no real way to automatically identify affected posts (unlike with, say, the missing attachments from the LF.com import, where the app detected which posts had missing ones and added a fixed note to each one, which could then be searched for to quickly locate affected posts - this is how Prob Lem was able to restore them all so quickly).

(the LemmingsWelt backups don't have any post ID numbers IIRC, and even in cases that do have them (eg. the IsaMedia backup), they won't be the same between the backup and this forum's database)

This is something I'll have to look into eventually but it probably won't be today.
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #20 on: January 05, 2015, 10:11:58 AM »
I realize this is probably a problem unique to me :XD:, but I'm not a fan of seeing my own avatar in the header section of the forums (ie. near where the forum logo is located).  Any chance of not doing that (just like in the old forums) or failing that, have a per-user option to turn off displaying it there?

I've fixed this now. :)
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline GigaLem

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #21 on: January 05, 2015, 07:26:22 PM »
This will get some taking use to but its a nice fresh breath of air

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #22 on: January 06, 2015, 11:41:32 PM »
I'm reviewing some topics on the challenge board that were imported from the old lemmingswelt forum, and found that some of the posts' contents seem to be partially missing or otherwise not properly/fully imported.  For example, compare the following:

http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=263 (what was imported)

http://www.camanis.net/lemmings/lemmingswelt/forums/?topic=1117597280 (archive of what they should be)

Obviously the first post of the topic is affected but it's probably not the only one.  I found another one on page 2, and there are probably more but I haven't looked further yet.

I took a closer look and I think the problems are happening exactly in posts that made use of characters outside the ASCII range, with the affected posts getting cut off exactly at the first occurrence of such a character.  For example, in the thread linked to above, the first affected post started with "I’ve", where the apostrophe is not the normal one you get from the keyboard, but the fancier one that I think is actually classified as "right single quotation mark".  And as one can see, after the import we lost everything past the first "I".  The second affected post (reply #10) quoted a part of LemSteven's original post and choked at the – character after import, which again is not the keyboard hyphen but the fancier "En Dash" character.

So there might be a relatively simple way to identify and fix the affected posts after all?  At least I don't think we have to manually compare to figure out which posts are affected, if my theory's correct.

As you can see plainly in this post, the non-ASCII characters in question do work correctly on this forum when I copy and paste them into this post here, so it's not clear yet why they aren't working with the import.  One possibility is that the old forum used different character encodings for those characters than the new one, though I would've thought that would just cause the characters to be displayed incorrectly rather than cutting off the remainder of the post.

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #23 on: January 07, 2015, 12:30:38 AM »
I'll look into that when I get home. (about an hour from now)
Thanks for identifying the likely cause. :)

EDIT: Okay, I looked at the source files from the backup, as well as the SQL file. Notepad++ assumes the SQL file is SHIFT-JIS encoding (a Japanese character set) which may be the source of the problem. I'm going to look at the database itself on here to see exactly how these posts imported, to see if
a) an automatic script could possibly fix them
b) if not, then if an automatic script could possibly at least identify them

In the latter case, depending on how many there are, I'll see whether it'll be less effort to write some script to re-import the broken ones, or to simply manually fix them up.

EDIT: Okay, so the cut-off happened while importing the posts through PHPMyAdmin - the full content is there (albeit with slight corruption on those characters) in the SQL file; it's gone in the copies of the posts on the database for this forum.

Thus, the easiest way to identify them will be to modify the code used to generate the LemmingsWelt SQL import code.

EDIT: Done this, and am currently running it. Basically; the code is set to print out (to a text file) a list of posts that have non-ASCII standard characters.


EDIT: Done this too. Although they are a minority of the LemmingsWelt posts (and since the test was simply "is there any character that isn't standard ASCII", it might have some false positives), there is a significant number of them, so I modified the app again to create a SQL file that'll add these posts to a temporary database table, with the characters causing the corruption converted to the HTML special character equivalent (eg, character 0x9F would become F;, just to give an example). If this goes well and imports successfully, I'll write a PHP script that attempts to automatically fix the broken posts based on this temporary table.
« Last Edit: January 07, 2015, 01:59:33 AM by namida »
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #24 on: January 07, 2015, 02:22:38 AM »
Okay, should be fixed. It doesn't have the exact characters - I really have no idea why exactly this is - but honestly, I don't think it's a huge deal. The posts are definitely readable now.
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline grams88

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #25 on: January 09, 2015, 12:34:30 PM »
Hi Everyone

I've noticed a new emoticon,  :lix: I don't think I remember seeing that one before maybe it was different in the past.

Offline Proxima

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #26 on: January 09, 2015, 01:16:31 PM »
 :lix: is new. She represents the characters from the game Lix.

Offline Clam

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #27 on: January 15, 2015, 07:03:55 AM »
Is it possible to stop the whole page jumping around when the news ticker changes?

Offline IchoTolot

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #28 on: January 15, 2015, 01:18:49 PM »
Is it possible to stop the whole page jumping around when the news ticker changes?

Yes that would be great! I thought I was the only one with that issue :P

Offline Nepster

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #29 on: January 15, 2015, 04:50:38 PM »
There is a button in the upper right corner of the "News"-box, that shrinks the whole News section. This takes care of the page-jumping issue, if you don't mind missing updates in the news ticker.

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #30 on: January 15, 2015, 08:11:37 PM »
Is it possible to stop the whole page jumping around when the news ticker changes?

namida's probably more knowledgeable in this.  Collapsing the news section may be your best option for now, and the forum seems to remember your preference so you don't have to do it every time you are on the home page (well, except to actually see the news...).  Things jump around because different news items take up different heights so the news section's height isn't fixed, and the ticker cycles through the news.  I'm not sure there's a way to make the browser minimize the amount of jumping in those situations.  I think there are admin settings to disable having the news ticker cycling through multiple news items, or to increase the amount of time (currently 15 seconds I think?) between cycling items in the news ticker, but they are stopgap measures at best.  The latter setting could potentially be something we try though, if expanding/collapsing the news section yourself gets inconvenient.

The interesting thing is that I never noticed it myself until you point it out, because I rarely stay on the main page for that long.  I started drilling down into recent posts or boards pretty quickly.

Offline ccexplore

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #31 on: January 16, 2015, 01:40:51 AM »
Okay, I sort of "fixed" this by making all 4 current news items take up the same number of lines (3).  It's not perfect as things like emoticons can affect line height as well, but close enough that the jumps should be less noticeable at least.  Note:  on small devices like mobile phones it may still not work due to word wrapping, I haven't bothered to look.  As part of doing this, I need to move the news item with the staff contact information into a post since it's too much to try distilling into 3 lines without getting cramped up there.

It is not the permanent solution we want for obvious reasons.  Admins with better skills/time than me can perhaps look and see if the default style can be updated to make the news section fixed in height rather than based on how many lines a news item needs.  This approach of course has its disadvantages too, so I'm not honestly sure that's the way we want to go.  It would be interesting to see how many people actually pay attention to the news ticker (ie. for its usefulness), and how many people are getting annoyed by the news ticker's cycling causing the main page to jump.  There's no point in working hard on this if for the people who are actually annoyed, collapsing the news ticker section is an acceptable solution.

Offline namida

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #32 on: January 16, 2015, 02:34:48 AM »
It's something I can look into at some point. My guess is a fix would need to use CSS, which is something I'm still quite new to, but there *should* be a way hopefully. :)
My Lemmings projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)

Offline Clam

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Re: Welcome to the new Lemmings Forums... yet again.
« Reply #33 on: January 16, 2015, 08:45:32 AM »
I don't read the news (the years-old "news" on the previous forum rather turned me off it :P) so just collapsing the ticker works fine for me :). Thanks for the tip - I just assumed it'd reset to displaying the news each time you loaded the page.