Site changes coming - soon

[Redmax]

Hey Everyone,

I have taken in a lot of feedback regarding some changes I'll be making around here. Keep in mind that the majority of the changes are with the back-end CMS, for automation and cr@p like that, however the biggest change is that the Ninjaforum is going to be moving.

For those of you that have glazed thru the "About Ninjalane" article you will know that back in the early days, the Ninjalane Message Forum was an integrated part of Ninjalane.com. Then when the site moved to a dedicated hosting provider the old forum software was ditched for the feature rich and "free" forum, PHPBB.

The downside to this was given the architecture differences between Asp.net (the main site) and PHP (the forum) there was no way for me to combine the sites so http://www.ninjaforum.com was acquired and became the new home of the Ninjalane Message Forum.

In hindsight it would seem that spinning the forum off to a separate domain with different graphics was a mistake. So with recent advances in my coding library I am once again able to combine the 2 sites together and actually share some information between them.

So here is what will be changing.
1) http://www.ninjaforum.com will be going away in favor of http://forums.ninjalane.com
2) Shared login session between the forum and the main site.
3) direct discussion links when an article is published.
4) the "Blogs" mod will be going away in favor of a new subforum (better exposure)
5) Ninjalane.com header graphics and links will be applied to the forum so everything will look seamless

Future updates
1) Email notifications regarding new article postings to be sent to all forum members.
2) Advertisements added to the forum

So what does this mean for you?
Aside from the obvious change to your bookmarks.... Nothing, Your forum experience should get better as a result.
All of the accounts, posts and replies will be retained. Some links to various forum posts from other sites will break, but that is to be expected.

During this transition PHPBB will be upgraded to the latest version which unfortunately breaks the KittenAuth implementation. With any luck KittenAuth will be back but it’s not likely to happen any time soon.

I'll update this thread as things progress along. Look for the revisions to take place in the next week or so.

If you have any comments or concerns please post them here or send me a PM. I look forward to hearing from you all.

[satoon101]

Sounds good. Are all current posts going to be moved over, or will it start out clean? I'm assuming the former, but I've seen many forums that used the latter when updating. Also, I connect to the forum through Ninjalane.com, but for those that don't, will there be a redirect for at least a couple months for those that connect directly to Ninjaforum?

Satoon

[Redmax]

Sounds good. Are all current posts going to be moved over, or will it start out clean? I'm assuming the former, but I've seen many forums that used the latter when updating. Also, I connect to the forum through Ninjalane.com, but for those that don't, will there be a redirect for at least a couple months for those that connect directly to Ninjaforum?

Satoon

The database is going to be the same, in fact most everything will be the same, the only change will be the URL used to connect to the forum and theme used to show the various graphics.

I'm still working out a "redirect" option for people connecting to ninjaforum.com. but yes my intention is to have a "hey we have moved" splash screen up so folks with old bookmarks can still find the board.

Google makes it easy to change URLs. they have this fancy tool in the webmasters interface that will allow me to tell them of the change so they can update the google cache and transfer over my page rank etc..

[Redmax]

Ok so here is an update.

Turns out that client work, reviews, and life in general have gotten in the way of my weekend code release, but.... Its still on the table to make happen.

Stay tuned.

[Redmax]

Well the primary changes have been made.

Wadda think?

[skier]

need to make the link at the top of the main page not go to forums.com

[Redmax]

need to make the link at the top of the main page not go to forums.com

ya, I dunno what link you are talking about.

[slngsht]

I'm not seeing that link either...

[skier]

need to make the link at the top of the main page not go to forums.com

ya, I dunno what link you are talking about.

let me help you out a little bit, see i don't go directly to the forums, i go to the main site and go from there:

this one.jpg (382.74 KiB) Viewed 629 times

edit: alternately how can you possibly get to the forums without using that link? i've been scrolling down to the site changes news post and clicking that link....(is why i was shocked you didnt know what i was talking about...)

[Redmax]

Seems the link changes based on the URL.

most of us use the http://www.ninjalane.com URL. seems you are using the http://ninjalane.com version.

Seems you have actually found a bug, good job.

The question now is.... how are you getting to the forum if the link at the top of the page is broken??

[Redmax]

Seems you have actually found a bug, good job.

and........ now its fixed.

[skier]

i'd scroll down to the article about the changes and used the link there

[slngsht]

That picture is epic.

[thedoghouse]

Just my opinion, maybe set up a chatbox? I think that'd be a good addition to the site

[Redmax]

Just my opinion, maybe set up a chatbox? I think that'd be a good addition to the site

Thought about doing a chatbox. wasn't sure how much use it would get, and if it would detract from the overall community.