To all SSC Station occupants
Thank you for the donations over the past year (2024), it is much appreciated. I am still trying to figure out how to migrate the forums to another community software (probably phpbb) but in the meantime I have updated the forum software to the latest version. SSC has been around a while so their is some very long time members here still using the site, thanks for making SSC home and sorry I haven't been as vocal as I should be in the forums I will try to improve my posting frequency.
Thank you again to all of the members that do take the time to donate a little, it helps keep this station functioning on the outer reaches of space.
-D1-
Technically the site is live on SSC just in a subdomain so I can test and write queries etc....
This weekend I got PHPBB up and running and was able to import the users/forums.
I will try to start importing of posts this week if I have time, I have to figure out a way to make sure that attachments stay linked if possible so I will need to test that.
Examples:
 I will need to spend a lot of time redoing the download section, and I think that new captcha I have should stop the majority of people from spamming SSC 😉 Thanks for the patience. I am expecting some sort of data loss or conversion issues (ex: attachments (will file linking be easy to attain, media linking like YouTube links, etc... because tags are different) because there is no conversions for wpForo that I could find. But once I am on phpBB I will probably stay here. I like the SIMPLE look and its a lot quicker than the present website and phpBB versions and enhancements are released slowly with little impact to existing base.
Any thoughts on the theme or colors? I have a lot of testing, but hope to go online with it before the end of the year.
-D1-
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Any thoughts on the theme or colors?
Dark Greens and Blues do it for me. I think phpBB installs can have a Dark Mode, which is always handy.
Looking good D1Â
Only thing I can think of is the white text could be a bit brighter, although it may be my monitor making it look dull. Â
@cody Is that color scheme for the backgrounds/borders and headers that you are mentioning or text colors?
The theme itself looks good, I just need to play with the colors.... I will try to add some greens/blues over the next few days and post something up. I trying to get something subtle that isn't too bright, but also not too dark that makes you have to strain to read it 🙂
Might be hard to see but I can manipulate the CSS to change title colors and leave the description white/off-white
The borders (purple color) I can change that to whatever as well, same with the grayish background for the rows.
I will play with the blues/greens/dark gray colors and see what I can come up with.
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I am trying to get all the functionality and pages and mods working before I attempt the inserting of all the posts. Gonna be slow going but goal is this year. I have to take a lot of notes on the SQL queries I am writing up to pull out all the data and then put it into the correct columns in phpbb. I will probably make some bogus posts to test media linking and text formatting as well. And I will probably add more forum areas and remove some to the junk yard (dead zone).
Is that color scheme for the backgrounds/borders and headers that you are mentioning or text colors?
For backgrounds/borders etc... white text is fine.
I would say go with a white text rather than an off white text as it looks in the pic above it looks like the text is a grey colour and it's not standing out from the background.
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On my aging monitor the screenshots might lack contrast a bit? But they're perfectly readable nonetheless.
Good luck with the coding!
What is tough is that I have to manually manipulate data in the DB tables because they are not even close to lining up so conversion is a difficult, maybe that is why there is no converter for this platform to anything else. Guess its good for business, make it extremely difficult to leave .... ugh. I have to figure out the threads/posts because they are not linking up right and have to figure out how to solve it.
I may try to save off the whole site and try a upgrade to the latest version of this forum software since there has been 20+ version updates. But if I upgrade all the forum plugins would stop working unless I buy them all again. So this maybe last resort, or I will just stay on this version until I am forced to move off because of PHP/SQL requirements. But I have some time off in Dec I plan on diving more into this again, because I would really like to migrate away from all this.
I updated the site to use the latest versions of wordpress and the existing forum software. I will need to update the theme to match what was there before so bare with me, my first priority was making sure the site still functioned 😉
I have still not given up on the conversion of the site to something more simple (like PHPBB) its just I have been running into conversion issues and I needed to upgrade the site so it wouldn't be deprecated. But things seem to be running and I will keep an eye out and I will try to work on the theme these week to get back to where it was before (or close too it).
I will also need to look at the DB tables for this 2.x release of the forum software to see if it may be easier to move away from it (probably not) the tables are a little close to PHPBB in some way but a lot different in others. Where PHPBB may self contain all 'topics' in one table in wpForo it may be spread across three, or wpForo doesn't store specific data that PHPBB is looking for ... so yeah it will take time.
very white, think I may have snow blindness 🙂Â
Where are my Joo Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.
I been messing around with the theme for the forum section and I think visually it looks good, please let me know if you see any anomalies with the color changes etc...
I will look into seeing if I can get some of the addins re-added to the forum section, most importantly the embedding addon which puts the YT videos directly into the post instead of clicking on a link.
And for the people with older eyes (yes I am getting there too haha), I have upped the text font size a little. 🧐Â
Looking good, D1. You under that snowstorm currently hitting NE states?
Agree with Cody, looking good.
Hi everyone! Firstly, a belated happy new years to you all. Sorry I've not been around much but I've been going through some "real life stuff" of late that took up so much of my time. Anyways, here now and the forum is looking great. Well done D1! 😊Â
Thanks Cody and Pinback... took me some time playing with the colors haha. But I think this is very readable for most people.Â
@geraldine Thanks Geraldine and I definitely know about RL stuff taking up time (plus I been trying to game more too), and Happy New Year to you as well.