The LUG has migrated to XenForo!

Orren Merton

Orren Merton

LUG Emeritus
Welcome to the new LUG! You'll notice that we're using a different software package. We've migrated from vBulletin to XenForo.

To the users of the LUG, this no doubt looks like very short notice. But believe it or not, this has been in the works for many months. The version of vBulletin we've been using has more or less been abandoned, and the new version doesn't appeal (it's too much in some ways, not enough in others). But to get the back end right, to not lose members or posts, has taken us way more testing and prototyping than we anticipated.

Hopefully you'll like the new software—it was decided on after actually buying the upgrade to vBulletin, and being pretty unhappy with it on our development server, and then doing serious research. If you have any questions, this is the forum to discuss it. We're volunteers, this is all of our forum, so we want everyone to be able to navigate and enjoy it.

Thanks!
Orren
 
Thanks Doug. Please let us know what you like, dislike, prefer - we're grateful for any feedback. As Orren mentioned, we hope everyone will enjoy and feel at home here on the LUG.

kind regards

Mark
 
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One thing I've noticed is we have bigger avatars here, so the old ones look a bit fuzzy or pixelly as they are smaller images stretched to be bigger, so ideally upload a new one. The recommended sizes is 200 x 200 px
 
Well done. It looks very good on both laptop and iPad. Good use of white space. And I like the fuzzy avatars. Will there be a price increase?
 
bayswater said:
Will there be a price increase?
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I guess it depends where you live, and the exchange rate. We were thinking of raising the price of the LUG from $0 to £0. 😉

But that is a good point, and gives us an opportunity to point out something that hopefully isn't too obtrusive. The LUG is free, and we're all volunteers—but that doesn't mean there are no costs associated with it. There's server fees, the price of the XenForo license (and before, vBulletin), etc. So right now, we're paying for that via the ad bar at the top. It's pennies per day but it is just enough to cover costs (or at least, the amount we pay out of pocket isn't enough for us to complain). If anyone does find the banner really objectionable please let us know. There's always options such as creating a "sponsor" tier that eliminates the ads.

As ever, it's your feedback that helps guide what we do.

Thanks!
Orren
 
I guess the new software is having a couple of teething problems. I usually go to "new posts" right away. Just did it and up came a thread on "sampletank problems". Quite interesting. I got to the end of it before I noticed that last post was in 2009! Well, it WAS new to me.
 
bayswater said:
I usually go to "new posts" right away.
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Bayswater, I usually go (or went) to new posts as well, along with the "todays posts" feature we had in bulletin. Right next to the new posts button is "recent posts". Have a look at that, it's very useful.

kind regards

Mark
 
bayswater said:
I guess the new software is having a couple of teething problems. I usually go to "new posts" right away. Just did it and up came a thread on "sampletank problems". Quite interesting. I got to the end of it before I noticed that last post was in 2009! Well, it WAS new to me.
Click to expand...
Strange, it's working find here.

Probably a cache issue, I will rebuild the search index
 
With the old software, bookmarking something that changes like New Posts didn't work: I got either errors, or "no matches". With the new software, should it be possible to bookmark New or Recent? I notice the URL resulting from going to New or Recent contains a counter that increments each time you use it. The bookmark then takes you to a previous version of the New or Recent page.
 
The import caused some issues re: embeds. We will get the Youtube embeds back soon, meanwhile I have fixed Soundcloud and installed a nice addon so you can embed direct from the media icon in the text editor or (nice) just paste the URL into the message:

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