2009-06-15: Forum Upgraded

[infoxicated]

The forum has been upgraded to vBulletin 3.8.3

Don't expect any major upgrades - it's just a small increment in the version number and consisted of bug & security fixes.

As ever, let me know if anything appears to have gone wrong due to the upgrade.

[Darkdrium777]

I don't know if I've said this before:
Can this be fixed or is it inherent to VBulletin?

[mdhay]

BTW, I love the upgrade message. Nice work.

Nice, I'm on that pic!

[infoxicated]

I don't know if I've said this before:
Can this be fixed or is it inherent to VBulletin?

That... that does my head in, actually. Anyone ever notice that the floating banner works on the PSP browser but not on the PS3? I find **** like that annoying.

It can be fixed, though. What browser are you using there?

//this update didn't break the templates, so I might as well break them myself this time.

[Darkdrium777]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11

[infoxicated]

Oooh. That's interesting. It happens on Chrome, too.

Only if you have enough friends to make it scroll, though.

If you we're Gollum you wouldn't have this problem.

^ an example of bad tech support.

[Darkdrium777]

It does that with the tabs on Visitor page too.

[mdhay]

That... that does my head in, actually. Anyone ever notice that the floating banner works on the PSP browser but not on the PS3? I find **** like that annoying.

Now that you mention it, it does. Wonder why....

[infoxicated]

I looked. Can't fix it.

Seems to be a problem with list items when it comes to floats & stacks. The navigation tabs and the friends lists are all list items. Even if I set their z-index to 10 and the z-index of the floating banner to 100 it still layers the list elements above the floating banner.

The vBulletin style manager is quite the spaghetti junction of styles and inheritance and I'm not awake enough or motivated enough to figure out all of the cascades to see what's modifying the z-index of list items.

//end explanation

//begin rant

It would go away if I took out the floating banner, but it's the principle of the matter... it should work and it should have worked ten years ago, because floats and stacks aren't exactly cutting edge stuff.

I remember we had a similar problem years ago when I used an image map in the banner and it worked in everything but IE6, as IE6 had a bug that stopped it rendering an image map in a floated layer. Reasonably clever people kept posting "if you split the image in two and put anchor tags around each image you'll get the same result" as if I didn't already know how to work around it. Pretty much all web development is based on working around stuff that should work in a straightforward way, but doesn't. I kept that image map banner up for ages, too - on principle, until I decided that it was unfair that IE6 users couldn't click on the banner.

//end rant

Maybe I'll look at that again tomorrow... but I'll probably drop the floaty banner with the next version of the site, and it's been around so long that another wee while isn't going to drive anyone mad. Probably. Standard mental health disclaimers apply.

[Sausehuhn]

As I don't know where to post it, I'll post it here. Rob - you made my day!

[infoxicated]

I'm glad, Max.

[Darkdrium777]

ROFL

Yeah, what's up with the database issues all the time?

[infoxicated]

It's hardly all the time. Just every few days something is hitting the server hard, taking up all the database connections and causing the database server to die.

It's probably some brute strength attack - we've had to block a couple of IP's at server level due to that a while back, so maybe there's a new one we have to see about blocking, too.

[Darkdrium777]

Haxorger is still trying to take down the site?

Probably just too many people online, no?

[infoxicated]

What causes the database to crash is far from normal use. The site has coped with far higher traffic conditions than it is experiencing right now, so these are isolated events aimed at either denial of service or attempting to access the forum admin.

I need to pour through the logs to find out, but right now I don't have the time. Thanks for posting, though.

[Darkdrium777]

Eh, I don't understand why someone would want to hack a fan site.
As long as you say it's under control and that we won't get threads about you and your mother in every section of the forum again

Good luck with what's going on with you.

[infoxicated]

Thanks!

It's not luck I need right now - just a winning lottery ticket.

Oh... wait...

[Lance]

...Pretty much all web development is based on working around stuff that should work in a straightforward way, but doesn't. ...

So very true.


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BTW, The forum seemed to automatically log me out three times in ten minutes when I logged in to check stuff from mod alerts. Probably nothing, but possibly should be noted if it happens to others.

edit: The damned thing just logged me out again.

[Sausehuhn]

Rob, there's one thing about the floating banner I would like you to fix if you find the time sometime:
The transparent area underneath the shadow is relatively big. Is it possible to make it around the half shorter? Almost always when I want to click links that are right under the banner I cannot click them because of the invisible part of graphic that is above it.

And don't get my wrong; I don't want to make demands. I'm probably the only one having the problem anyway

[infoxicated]

Ooh.

It was that size by accident from when the banner was bigger.

Should be fixed, now. //new smiley alert!