The Energon Pub

[Seibertron]

CONSTRUCTICONS REBUILD!

Use password "PRIME" (no quotes) to access this forum.

[Glyph]

I'm here, after having to re-log and scrub cookies to get the SA banner to show again so I could copy-paste the password... didn't realise just by looking at it that the O's were 0's!

Initial impressions are decent for the overall look - I'll be able to give more feedback when I've had chance to play around a bit. I note the footer CSS is broken: it's pinning to the bottom of the content area, but the right sidebar is frequently much longer than the content and goes under the footer and out the other side.

Question for how this works: is there a way to flip between the existing and SA versions of the site? I had expected we'd be testing the new site on a separate subdomain or have a toggle or something, rather than just being switched to the new version. That's both to be able to compare the changes side-by-side, and in case something breaks in development and stops me from actually using the site (for example: HMW doesn't work at all on the new version. I can't activate bots or view mission logs and the old tabular layout is thoroughly broken by the new CSS).

I'm happy to debug and evaluate the new version on the understanding that everything's still experimental, but I do kinda need to also be able to get back to a working version of the site while that's happening.

[Seibertron]

Can you email me a screenshot of what's broken in HMW? You might just need to force a refresh on those pages.

[Glyph]

Heading into meetings atm, will get some screenshots for you afterwards. It's definitely not just a refresh issue though - it's failing to find the teams/bots/missions in the DB so I'm guessing it's a similar issue to the cron job. If you take a look at any of your own bots' character pages or recent missions, you should see what I mean.

ashe5k is having the same issues, so not limited by account either.

[Seibertron]

Hey Glyph,

Just wanted to give you guys a quick update. One of the trickiest parts of working with HMW right now is that a lot of the legacy code uses @mysql_query and similar patterns, which suppress errors. I’ve been upgrading the rest of Seibertron to use mysqli_ with some custom db_ wrappers that adapt based on site version, and because HMW has stayed mostly unchanged for the last 15 years, I keep running into little conflicts as the newer systems interact with it.

The core of HMW is impressively stable — it’s just that as the rest of the site evolves, I keep uncovering integration quirks I didn’t anticipate. I’ll probably start removing the @ suppressors and gradually modernizing things where needed so I can see and fix issues more easily.

Just wanted to keep you in the loop in case anything looks weird or breaks temporarily while I’m untangling things.

Ryan

[Glyph]

Thanks Ryan, that makes sense. One of the plans I had for HMW if I got to code it again was to move all those explicit mysql_*() calls out of the various functions/pages and centralise them in a DB class that could then be wrapped, extended or just debugged all in one place.

Good to see that the connection seems to be resolved now, I can see characters & logs, activate bots etc. Thanks for the quick fix!
Layout is still all kinds of messed up so I'll grab some screenshots for that.

--EDIT--
Ack, I can activate bots but now the form on missions.php has no submit/cancel buttons so can't send them to missions...


Re the version toggle I asked about above - because HMW was the biggest broken thing for me, but the other points still stand - if I click the EXIT button on the SA banner (goes to [ /set-silver-age.php?view=0 ] ), will I find a similar button on the other side to get back to the SA preview? Can I use that same URL with [ ?view=1 ] to do it? Don't want to just click blindly and get stuck.

[Seibertron]

Re the version toggle I asked about above - because HMW was the biggest broken thing for me, but the other points still stand - if I click the EXIT button on the SA banner (goes to [ /set-silver-age.php?view=0 ] ), will I find a similar button on the other side to get back to the SA preview? Can I use that same URL with [ ?view=1 ] to do it? Don't want to just click blindly and get stuck.

The session variable will just reset for that when you close your browser window. I don't want to spend too much time on that logic. I spent all last night working on all of the bugs dealing with the version control so I gutted much of the version control system into something less clunky and more straightforward. I'm on 3 hours of sleep from my nap last night.

I'm slamming through a bunch of global changes in HMW. I replaced all references to mysql_ and then I've been debugging the outdated HTML. I'm spending too much time on this right now. I isolated the problem with a lot of HMW's display issues to the CSS "row" class, which I've had in SEIBERTRON.com for decades, but it conflicts with Bootstrap's "row" class. So I'm going through all of the HMW files systematically to find and manually replace all of the instances where row and alternate classes are. It's more challenging than it seems because of all of the various ways those classes are utilized through HMW's code ... and avoiding conflicts with the $row variable and use of the word "alternate" in places like "alternate mode".

[Seibertron]

The session variable will just reset for that when you close your browser window. I don't want to spend too much time on that logic. I spent all last night working on all of the bugs dealing with the version control so I gutted much of the version control system into something less clunky and more straightforward. I'm on 3 hours of sleep from my nap last night.

DOH! I already have a built-in way to get back to the redesign if you don't want to close your browser to reset the session if you clicked the "exit" button. Just manually go to https://www.seibertron.com/?view-silver-age=1 which will reset the session variable again for the redesign. You can add ?view-silver-age=1 to any URL on SEIBERTRON for it to work properly.

[Seibertron]

Ok, i uploaded all of the changed files with some HTML "fixes" and replacing row and alternate CSS classes in PHP and javascript files with "bg-row-light" and "bg-row-alt". I have not had a chance to test any of these changes as it affected hundreds of files.

[Glyph]

Huh, kinda surprised that the "row" & "alt" classes hadn't conflicted with something before, to be honest. They stopped working properly at the last redesign, but at least didn't completely break.

Fun thing with the HMW layout code, it was designed when the site looked like this!

I kept & extended the existing 2003-vintage HTML table layout, but the redesigns broke a lot of stuff by adding default padding, removing classes that were providing table borders etc. Ironically, the thing that kept HMW sort-of working is that so much of the layout was (terribly) hard coded into style attribs directly in the HTML!

One issue is that HMW wants to work more like a tightly-formatted game UI than a flexible forum or gallery. It needs completely reworking with modern syntactic HTML of course, preferably with some type of components, but I'd strongly favour adding a HMW-specific class to the page-content div (or something like that) in order to insulate the main site and HMW from each other and let HMW override site styles for its particular needs. That way it's more likely to degrade gracefully and not completely break and need extensive fixing when the overall site style gets updated.

... that was longer trip down memory lane than I meant to write. I just went to dig out some truly ancient screencaps to respond to something Silver Wind said, and they're not even in this thread... Promise I'll do some general non-HMW feedback too!

I'm slamming through a bunch of global changes in HMW. [...] I'm spending too much time on this right now. [...] I have not had a chance to test any of these changes as it affected hundreds of files.

My Business Change Process-addled heart misses a beat...

[Silver Wind]

... that was longer trip down memory lane than I meant to write. I just went to dig out some truly ancient screencaps to respond to something Silver Wind said, and they're not even in this thread... Promise I'll do some general non-HMW feedback too!

Found you!

The style fit perfectly with my Windows XP user account, too!

circa 2006

And yeah, understandable HMW is lower priority. It would be nice to have a separate visual style for HMW once the dust has had a chance to settle for the website as a whole.

[Glyph]

I'm liking the dedication to keeping the centre clear, and the many WinAmp playlists.

(Now that's a social media feature I actually would like to see added to the forums: the ability to 'react' to a post without needing to add a full reply. There's a couple of phpBB extensions out there for it, but as far as I know it's not an official feature as yet.)

[Psychout]

Hello! Just to say that I am here. I don't really understand any of what you and Glyph are talking about, however I'm here to help however I can.

[First Gen]

Just logged in and am looking around. Aside from what Glyph covered, is there a way to add to the homepage like a top hottest discussions in the forums? Something for users to "stay in know" on popular topics?

[Seibertron]

:)) I'm liking the dedication to keeping the centre clear, and the many WinAmp playlists.

(Now that's a social media feature I actually would like to see added to the forums: the ability to 'react' to a post without needing to add a full reply. There's a couple of phpBB extensions out there for it, but as far as I know it's not an official feature as yet.)

I hope you guys can start compiling a wish list of features like that. I'm going to finally gut phpBB this year. Like *really* gut it (i.e. rewrite most of the front end). It was so customized back around 2010 at that point that I couldn't upgrade the forums to a new version. It's time to just modernize these forums into something closer to what Twitter/X, Instagram and Facebook are but with a modern day forum / Seibertron / Transformers fan twist to it.

Sky's the limit. Make your wish lists. It's happening.

[Seibertron]

Just logged in and am looking around. Aside from what Glyph covered, is there a way to add to the homepage like a top hottest discussions in the forums? Something for users to "stay in know" on popular topics?

Absolutely. Content from the forums will be part of the new homepage. Besides hottest and newest topics, any other requests for something on the homepage or right sidebar column?

[Seibertron]

Due to some conflicting code that I just couldn't get right between the styling of the "main" content area's structure, I "rolled" the site back to just the old "Golden Age" version of Seibertron.com (version 13.297). I'm restructuring the "middle" / content portion of the new site and it's just a mess at the moment. When I get that stable again, I'll reintroduce the new design. Good news is that I implemented a way to have different headers and footers using the version control so now there's a separate header and footer for the old site than the new site so that I didn't have so much convoluted code. It's much more streamlined now.

[william-james88]

Prime