Forum software?

NaturalNine

Forum looks great! What program is this?

ntozier

Sorry, I do not know what forum software they moved to.

NaturalNine

ntozier For the most part, it looks like everything content-wise transferred from Vanilla OK, except for the paragraphs. For example, I see a lot of text blocks in the old posts with no breaks now. Not sure why paragraphs and other styling didn't make it or if it could have been done. Oh well, onward!

NaturalNine

Thanks for the reply. I know the previous forum used Vanilla Forums. I see lots of sites using Discourse https://www.discourse.org/ , so was curious what this was. Thanks again!

remalia

The forum software is Flarum https://flarum.org/
I know it because i follow osTicket on twitter and there is a patreon tweet about osticket backing Flarum software.
https://twitter.com/osTicket/status/963845838404505600

NaturalNine

remalia Thanks!

ntozier

The URL you posted doesn't work for me...

remalia

ntozier Go on twitter and follow osTicket, its the second post.

remalia

ntozier

Must have been a server glitch. the url works now. /weird

NaturalNine

Is there anyway to see the old forum posts? The imported code examples now are all but unusable in this forum. For example, check out this SQL mod from EOHSupport (https://forum.osticket.com/d/85900-auto-close-resolved-tickets-after-3-days/4):
I think this SQL is better:*** change ost_DB to the ost database name.use ost_DB;update ost_DB.ost_ticket inner join ost_ticket_status on ost_ticket.status_id = ost_ticket_status.id set ost_ticket.status_id = (select ost_ticket_status.id from ost_ticket_status where ost_ticket_status.name like 'closed')where ost_ticket_status.name like 'resolved' and DATEDIFF(now(), ost_ticket.updated ) > 3; I am going to schedule this with windows task scheduler. the command to schedule is:mysql -hlocalhost -uthe_userid -pthe_password < The_sql_File.SQL > the_output_File.txtI am thinking it would be good to have a feature in OST that allows you run SQL command on a schedule.If anyone else uses this I'd appreciate feed back.

ntozier

I'm not aware of a way to see the old forums anymore.

I imagine that read something close to:
--- Start old post ---

I think this SQL is better:

change ost_DB to the ost database name.use ost_DB;
update ost_DB.ost_ticket inner join ost_ticket_status on ost_ticket.status_id = ost_ticket_status.id set ost_ticket.status_id = (select ost_ticket_status.id from ost_ticket_status where ost_ticket_status.name like 'closed')where ost_ticket_status.name like 'resolved' and DATEDIFF(now(), ost_ticket.updated ) > 3;

I am going to schedule this with windows task scheduler. the command to schedule is:
mysql -hlocalhost -uthe_userid -pthe_password < The_sql_File.SQL > the_output_File.txt

I am thinking it would be good to have a feature in OST that allows you run SQL command on a schedule.If anyone else uses this I'd appreciate feed back.

--- end old post ---

As a side note there is a 3rd party plugin for automatically closing posts.
https://github.com/clonemeagain/plugin-autocloser

NaturalNine

ntozier Thanks for doing this. However, I was just posting it as an example of what happened to all the code posts. The idea of having to manually re-create all the posts that include code seems not only daunting but a big waste of time seeing as the old forum has it intact. Seems to me that the powers at be could simply revive the old Vanilla forum and put it in a different directory (for example, archive) and link to it. Thanks again!

KevinTheJedi

@NaturalNine

Sorry but this is the best we could do as the format for Vanilla posts is WAYYY different than Flarum posts...this isn’t Pokémon, we can’t catch ‘em all lol

Cheers.

NaturalNine

KevinTheJedi Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure understand, sorry. Isn't there a backup of the old Vanilla forum somewhere and if so, why couldn't there be a new read-only installation of it strictly for archival purposes? For example, phplist has both their old forum and their new forum available. Something like that.

KevinTheJedi

@NaturalNine

...two installations of the same forum with the same data?? that would make no sense at all...I mean, I get your point but that wouldn't make any sense...at all...

Just be glad we actually have older posts and all their content as we were (originally) only going to keep the ones from 1.10.x+. ?

It's not just a matter of re-importing posts....
The FORMAT of the Vanilla posts are DIFFERENT than the FORMAT of the Flarum posts. Vanilla used a combination of HTML/CSS and other formats where Flarum only uses Markdown format. There is no migration script to migrate from Vanilla to Flarum currently, so we had to write our own. This means we had to write our own conversion functions as well (HTML/CSS/etc -> to -> Markdown). Obviously you can't convert everything from HTML/CSS/etc to Markdown (as there are many ways to do just one thing in HTML and you can't guess every single way to do that one thing in HTML and find ways to convert them all to the Markdown equivalent unless you have all the time in the world) so yea...there will be some posts that just aren't converted correctly. We could go in and edit them manually and add the closest matches in Markdown but we would have to do this post-by-post which would obviously be wayy too time consuming and sooo not feasible as there are hundreds of thousands of posts.

So, like I said, the best we could do in the time-frame we had was to convert the MAIN HTML/CSS/etc tags to Markdown and hope for the best (for the rest). ?

Hopefully that clears things up a bit for you.

Cheers.

NaturalNine

KevinTheJedi

...two installations of the same forum with the same data?? that would make no sense at all...I mean, I get your point but that wouldn't make any sense...at all...

No. The old forum would be strictly read-only with no new posts. Again, using phplist as an example:
Here's their old forum
https://forums.phplist.com/

and their new
https://discuss.phplist.org/

NaturalNine

p.s. Search is still not working

KevinTheJedi

@NaturalNine

Ohhh I get you. We cannot do that as A.) we retired the old server and B.) we are not willing to run the old forum software on our new servers as we moved away from it specifically because it has many security vulnerabilities. Not going to run that on our equipment anymore due to the potential security risks.

P.S.
Gotta fix that in my free time.

Cheers.

NaturalNine

KevinTheJedi Thanks again for the replies. Vanilla Forums is mature software with large communities, some numbering in the millions of posts, so I'm wondering what security issues you're referring to. I just find it unfortunate that this new software mangled all the paragraphs and code of the old forum and the search doesn't work. You can't even use cached versions of the old one via site:forum.osticket.com searches on Google because this new forum is in the same directory... :-|