editor Posted March 2, 2019 Share Posted March 2, 2019 Hi HAIFers, I've been leaving notes for the moderators when I work on stuff around here to let them know what's happening. But for some reason I never let everyone else know about it. Seems strange. So I'm going to do for the general populace what I do for the mods — create a thread each month with little updates. It's a place for you to learn about new features, bugs, and generally know what's going on behind the scenes. It's also a good place to let me know of any problems you experience with HAIF. Here's what I've been up to recently: Upgraded the forum to the 4.4.0 software. The auto-update feature still doesn't work and results in taking down the entire forum, which it did last night. It took me a few hours to put the pieces back together, but at least I make good backups so no data was lost. I think it's because we've been running on the same software installation for the last 14 years, and there's just a lot of cruft in there. Working on improving page load speed. I know that to us humans it looks fine, but the search engines think HAIF is a little pokey. Interestingly, when I run Google's speed checker on the actual forum of the company that makes the forum software, it gets really bad marks. So I think we've found where the problem lies. I'll try to optimize some of their problems away. Did some work on the SSL stuff to make it more compatible with more browsers. Installed a certbot to automatically renew SSL certificates Audited the HAIF plugins and removed those what aren't used anymore. Did some work on the visuals. There were some bits of code from 2006 that are no longer needed. You may have noticed that the top-of-page ad moved. This is why. Upgraded to PHP 7.2. Answered a bunch of user e-mails. As always, feel free to e-mail me directly (PM for address if you don't already have it). Especially if you notice a problem with the forum. Built new sitemaps for Big G. Investigating some Google issues. It doesn't like the way the forum redirects clicks on some images. Added an automatic maintenance cronjob that runs every five minutes, instead of at kind of random times. Hopefully this speeds some things up. Removed some dead links Enabled lazy loading of images. Some people like this. Some people don't. I've enabled it in the name of page load speed, and we'll see how it works. If it bothers anyone, let me know. Animated GIFs are available, but only for people who know how to pronounce it correctly ;). It is accessed from the new GIF button at the far right in the message editor bar. It is now possible for unregistered guests to post message. Well, almost post. They can write what they want, but when the press "Submit," they'll have to then register. It's a non-traditional flow, but actually makes sense in a way. If you bookmark HAIF threads, you'll now notice there are page numbers as part of the URL, and not in some query string that can get lost. The javascript has been moved to improve page loading speed. HAIF now supports HTTP/2, which doesn't matter at all to 99.9999% of our visitors. Default profile avatars are now SVG for speed. Increased caching of page headers, footers, and other bits that don't change very much. "Guests" see content that is slightly older than the content registered users do. This isn't to be mean. It's increased caching to make things faster for registered users, and to not spend so many resources on scanning bots. You may notice a change in the look of the emoticons. This was due to licensing issues. Yes, non-Unicode emoticons have to be licensed. If you were a Gravatar user (and if you don't know what that is, you aren't), that has been removed for privacy reasons. That's it for this update. More to come. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IronTiger Posted March 2, 2019 Share Posted March 2, 2019 You may notice a change in the look of the emoticons. This was due to licensing issues. Yes, non-Unicode emoticons have to be licensed. Interesting. In the past I've used some direct links from [url=http://www.emoticons.online.fr/]Kenzo IPB Collection[/url] to supplement HAIF's collection, but I thought they were part of IPBoards to begin with (which is what at least this board used to be based on). Also, technically, the Unicode emojis are copyrighted by a German company, but they're already part of Unicode... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mkultra25 Posted March 2, 2019 Share Posted March 2, 2019 4 hours ago, editor said: Animated GIFs are available, but only for people who know how to pronounce it correctly ;). Hard "g" as opposed to peanut butter, I assume. 😉 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
editor Posted March 2, 2019 Author Share Posted March 2, 2019 Just now, mkultra25 said: Hard "g" as opposed to peanut butter, I assume. 😉 Nope. Same as the peanut butter, per the inventor, and me, who was around when the GIF87A standard was created on CompuServe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mkultra25 Posted March 2, 2019 Share Posted March 2, 2019 10 minutes ago, editor said: Nope. Same as the peanut butter, per the inventor, and me, who was around when the GIF87A standard was created on CompuServe. Well, I also pronounce "Gizmodo" with a soft "g". I'm starting to suspect I may be a contrarian. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Highrise Tower Posted March 3, 2019 Share Posted March 3, 2019 Great! Thanks for this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HoustonMidtown Posted March 9, 2019 Share Posted March 9, 2019 I am having trouble with the search feature - for example, I searched for HEB and it found no results....other results show only 1 or 2 posts and not the one I am looking for Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luminare Posted March 9, 2019 Share Posted March 9, 2019 1 hour ago, HoustonMidtown said: I am having trouble with the search feature - for example, I searched for HEB and it found no results....other results show only 1 or 2 posts and not the one I am looking for I noticed this too when trying to look up a thread for the Rothko Chapel. Searched "Rothko" or "Chapel" or "Rothko Chapel" etc... Found nothing, but then tried a search of things I knew were on the site like your example with "HEB" and got zero results. For some reason the search function is not picking up on any keywords. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeerNut Posted March 10, 2019 Share Posted March 10, 2019 Yeah the search is definitely broken. I've resorted to using a google site search to find post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mkultra25 Posted March 10, 2019 Share Posted March 10, 2019 15 hours ago, BeerNut said: Yeah the search is definitely broken. I've resorted to using a google site search to find post. More often than I'd have suspected, I've googled some arcane topic of local interest, only to find that the first search result was a link to a post on HAIF. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
editor Posted March 14, 2019 Author Share Posted March 14, 2019 Hi everyone. You may have noticed that HAIF fell over about 11 this morning. HAIF has been experiencing something of a growth spurt recently and I think that's what caused the problem. I've moved HAIF (again!) to a new server. Twice as much memory, twice as many CPUs, twice as much storage. Hopefully that will hold us for a while. Thank you for your patience during the move. And keep posting in the monthly threads about problems. I'll keep adding them to the list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luminare Posted March 14, 2019 Share Posted March 14, 2019 20 minutes ago, CrockpotandGravel said: The site is back online! What was the issue? I posted my message before yours Editor. Thanks for the explainer. @CrockpotandGravel @ekdrm2d1 @hindesky I blame these guys! Y'all and your construction images and....stuff! WAY to go fellas. Way...to...go. *sarcasm* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
H-Town Man Posted March 14, 2019 Share Posted March 14, 2019 I figured someone announced a supertall with GFR and it broke the website. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subdude Posted March 15, 2019 Share Posted March 15, 2019 Thanks. It's seems a lot faster now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeerNut Posted March 24, 2019 Share Posted March 24, 2019 This link doesn't go anywhere. Real Estate and Apartment Listings Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
editor Posted April 1, 2019 Author Share Posted April 1, 2019 On 3/23/2019 at 6:44 AM, CrockpotandGravel said: Three more things: 1. Can you fix the view number for the threads inside the forums? Before, it was possible to see how many times a thread was viewed, but for several months, it hasn't been functional. Newer threads show a 0 view count. I see this, too, now that you've mentioned it. I did a little database work that might help. I'll give it a few days to see if anything changes. Thanks for pointing it out! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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