Thank you for your patience during our forum transition

Well this was fun. Now please enjoy your new XenForo forums.

Special thanks to Taluntain and Slavik of XenForo for pretty much doing all of the actual work.

Note we are in the process of sorting out forum theme, user groups, avatars and pretty much everything else including all of the front page stuff which will probably need to be re-built entirely...

 

Any time, old buddy old pal.

 

Fancy, very fancy indeed.

Only T-A a site that was founded in the 21st century in the first place would have to be dragged into the 21st century.

Many thanks to all involved.

 

Incidentally, the migration from the old phpBB to XenForo has currently set us back approximately $250, and I expect the figure to reach $350-400 or more before we're done -- without including the costs of licence renewals.

Here's the breakdown of the costs:

XenForo licence - XF (1 year): $140
XenForo Media Gallery - XMG (1 year): $60
Import from phpBB->XF: $50
Complete conversion of the old TA phpBB style to XF style: $225
5 years' worth of licence renewals for XF+XMG: $275
PayPal fees: ~$40

The total comes to nearly $800, which I'd like to raise so that we're covered and that there's enough money in the piggy bank to pay for the licence renewals for the foreseeable future. Unlike with phpBB and Coppermine, which were open-source (and consequently free, but very light on features), XF & XMG are commercial software and considerably better in every respect. We've decided to ditch Coppermine along with phpBB as it's been the source of the latest exploit (and several previous ones) and go with XMG instead, which should be considerably more secure. XMG will integrate with XF, unlike Coppermine, which was standalone. However, at the moment there is no importer for the data from Coppermine to XMG yet, so we'll likely wait with enabling XMG until the importer is provided. The gallery will remain down until then to prevent the possibility of further exploits.

There have been practically no donations made for Terra-Arcanum since I put the PayPal button up on the old forums a few years ago, so there are no reserves to pay for any of this. What you'll donate now is what we'll have to work with. I've put back the old top ad block for now so please use the PayPal Donate button there to donate. I'll update the thread regularly with info on how much we've gathered. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR USERNAME IN PAYPAL DONATION NOTES SO WE KNOW WHO TO CREDIT!

Thanks!

 

Thanks to Vorak's very generous donation, we're now at $100 out of ~$600 needed.

 

Now at $120 thanks to Jojobobo!

 

Good to see this place back up again.

So in this feature rich environment – how exactly do I change to a non-American time format?

 

I think that's one of those XF things that was never added for some reason. You can't AFAIK - you get to use whatever format the forum is set to.

 

Thanks to another very generous donation, this one from Xz, we're now at $220 out of ~$600 needed

 

As an incentive to donate, would it be possible (without violating any licence agreements with XenForo) to remove ads for donators, and impose restrictions on our download library that can be avoided by donating?

Edit: Basically how moddable is XF?

 

About as moddable as it gets. We definitely could set up ad-free access for supporters. The only question is if @DarkUnderlord intends to transplant Codex's patron system here or if we'd need to use the basic XF system to achieve the same thing.

Either way, if you donate, your username will be listed here and when we add the ad-free option, we'll make sure that everyone who's donated gets it.

There might also be a mod for it. But frankly, it's one of those things that only bugs you the first week and then you get used to it, so not a very high priority with so many other things to work on right now. If you hover over any listed time with your cursor, you also get a more detailed date output.

--

We have a few more donations in: $8 from wobbler and $20 from papa_dog_1999 so we're at $248 out of ~$600 needed!

 

Whoa, Dark Elf's $200 donation brings us a lot closer to our goal - now at $448 out of ~$800 needed! Porting the style is going to be considerably more expensive than I expected, but we got very similar quotes from several respectable XF designers so there's no cutting corners there. DU's already ordered it and the style is being created as I write this. I updated the costs breakdown above accordingly.

 

I hope you're using the phpBB 2 style for the conversion. Because some corners were cut with the phpBB 3 style, so it's not as polished.

 

Sure it's open source, but T-A is very high traffic because of our download section and that makes our server costs higher.

The kind of restrictions I would suggest are:

• Waiting time to download, for example 60 seconds.
• No more than one download at a time.
• Minimum one hour between downloads.

All of which can be avoided by donating. All content will still be available for free, but some users might just donate a small amount to get rid of these restrictions.

 

The guy's using the phpBB3 template for reference since that's what we have available... if you have any specific examples on what needs polish, do post them.

I've set up a mild download restriction on my site (short waiting time between downloads) and I don't think anyone's ever donated just to get by that. Any restrictions that would actually make people pay to get by would have to be very annoying, but given the age and popularity of Arcanum downloads at this point I seriously doubt that the number of donations would be worth it in the end. I'm more in favour of more forum perks for donors.

All of the above would be doable, but again, I doubt it'd be worth it. Although T-A's still a relatively high-traffic site (cca 200GB bandwidth per month), downloads don't really present more of a problem than overall resource usage (CPU/RAM). Of course, once we get everything back up and running, including the gallery, that might change.

 

Many thanks to all involved. We'll resolve the pecuniary issue, one way or another.