Good morning!
Welcome to the new HeroMachine. We know it pretty much looks the same, but we've rebuilt the internals of our site from the ground up, including enabling new forums with all the old content imported.
The site is running a lot faster than before, and should be far more stable.
However, there will undoubtedly be bugs. Things to watch out for:
- Your user login may have disappeared. We had to clear out a ton of spam users. If we caught you by accident in the sweep, we're sorry. Send me a message via the contact form with your username, and I'll do what I can to re-enable your account.
- Your password may not work. Reset it. 🙂
- You may find threads in the forum claiming they were starting by some strange, mysterious figure called "hmadmin." The import process wasn't perfect -- pulling in 40,000+ messages took a little over eight hours of processing time by our server, and some stuff was bound to be missed.
- You may find missing images. Please report them to us via the contact form.
- To combat the onslaught of spammers (I literally had two register while I was putting the site back up within minutes of each other), we've enabled a CAPTCHA on registration. It seems to work fine; let us know if you have any issues logging in or registering.
- Please report any other bugs or performance issues on this post as a comment, or use the contact form.
We really appreciate everybody's patience while we upgraded the site, and we hope you all enjoy the shiny new code that's running it.
Woohoo! Awesome job, you guys!
Thanks!
Great to see the forums back up and running but why am I listed as a “participant” instead of a member like everyone else?
Some stuff I’ve noticed so far:
-Stickied threads have gotten unstuck
-The “Log in” link is hidden at the bottom of the page and is kinda hard to find.
-Pictures are now resized horizontally to fit the threads.
-Pictures can’t seem to be uploaded directly to the forum.
-The new format allows for slightly wider pictures (sweet!)
-The formerly tiny avatars are now reasonably sized (even better!)
Great to see the forums are back in business!
Basically, the moment you login and look at the forums, it upgrades you from “no role” to “participant” role. “Member” just means “we know you posted, but we can’t figure out your role, so we’re calling you a generic member.” Being a participant is better.
The stickied threads will have to be re-stickied, unfortunately — the import process didn’t carry them forward.
What error message are you getting when you try to upload directly to the forum?
And thanks for finding these issues!
Just happy to see everything is back.
Ah, ok. Cool.
Another question for you then. My avatar seems to have gotten lost in the move and I can’t figure out how to upload a new one. Is there a way? Not really a problem if their isn’t but I’d rather not be that anonymous little white dude.
Nevermind! It just took me a while to figure out that it just doesn’t work for quick replies.
Great to see the forums back.
I’ve been sweeping the forums just to check a few things and like Stulte I’ve noticed a few things (including some that Stulte has already posted, so I’ll leave them out).
1. We now seem to have a very empty forum front page. There’s no PM’s access, recently updated threads alerts (either as a button at the top or as a list lower on the page) or currently online banner. Are these going to be added later? The PM thing would be very useful because I use that function fairly regularly and I have no idea where to find it now.
2. Profiles have been changed. A few people have lost their avatars (myself being one) and when I went to my profile to see if I could change it back I found that there was no way to change my avatar. This is really the only problem I have with the new profile page layout though. (I know Anarchangel has posted about this above, I was writing this comment whilst that whole conversation was going on).
3. Like Anarchangel, I’ve been listed as a Participant. Does this mean the moderators have been reset?
Just a quick question about one new addition you’ve made. Is the favourite function for the threads or single posts, because the button is on individual posts, but on the profile it says you currently have no favourites topics. Could you just clarify this for us.
Did you have the ability to upload an avatar before? I thought they were just generated from Gravatar.
Yeah we did, there was an option to upload one from our own computers.
1. I’d suggest making a feature list request and emailing to me directly. I’ll drop you an email with mine.
2. I’m looking into a plugin to enable people to upload new avatars right now.
3. I only set myself, Kaldath, and Jeff as moderators for now, because we lost the permissions list when the old forums went down. Jeff will reset the permissions in a wee bit.
Yeah, I had an avatar on the forums that didn’t work on the blog. I know a lot of people used Gravatar for their avatar but I just uploaded one from the forums.
Subscriptions keep you updated on a topic. Favorites are like bookmarks, and can be on topics or posts.
You all now have the ability to upload avatars. Scope out your profile near the bottom, and let me know if you have any problems.
@BenFinn- Ok will do, but you might want to make sure you give it some sort of subject title like HM Forums, just so I know it’s you (obviously with emails I don’t recognise they get put in the spam box otherwise). I’ve just been playing around with the new avatar upload thing. I just went and created a gravatar avatar to see if that would work and there doesn’t seem to be any way of selecting it and setting it. It shows up as an option but I can’t actually select it. I then went through the upload files and it worked, so that’s working at least. Thanks for sorting it out though.
No probs. I just sent you the email.
And now I’m going to crash. Keep the comments coming, folks. I suspect we’ll be improving the forums dramatically over the next few days.
Massive thanks to Ben for this amazing, amazing work!
Great job, Ben! I’m able to post, and I still have my avatar. The only issue I noticed is that I can’t always go back and edit a post or I can only edit it once.
It appears Exporting from HM3 is also broken, I’m trying to figure out why.
I have just gotten on a little while ago, and I am going to have to find a tutorial on the Moderation options for these new forums before I can fully comment on the changes 😀 … One thing that is a bit of a hassle is not having a list of recent posts made to the forum, weather it be a new thread started or a comment to an older thread. That was a very useful tool for moderation purposes, to see who posted what where at a glance. Made it easier to find the spam bots. They way it appears to work not I will have to hunt through all the individual forum sections looking for new posts since I don’t intend to favorite/subscribe to every post of the forum.
Thanks for all the hard work Ben and Jeff!!! Cheers!
It also looks like the blog posts are not auto posting to the Facebook page anymore. For example, this post is not on Facebook.
I’m fixing that now.
How do you log in?
http://www.heromachine.com/wp-login.php — it’s in the “Meta” section in the right-hand column. I’ll go ahead and add it to the menu bar at the top as well.
Spambots are going to have a very, very hard time getting through now. 🙂
I’m going to be making a bunch of fixes to the forums (both in terms of look and feel and functionality) over the next few days. One of the things I’ll definitely be focusing on is providing informative info as multiple people have requested.
A few things:
1 – It appears BBPress doesn’t support private messaging — like, at all. Isn’t that annoying? I will be writing a plugin to BBPress to re-enable that, because that’s a bit silly. But two things — I may or may not be able to re-import all the old PMs (sorry), and it’s going to take a few days.
2 – I’m going to be making a bunch of changes to the forums appearance and functionality over the next few days to improve things. Please feel free to keep feature requests coming, but also realize that not everything may make it in.
3 – How are people finding the speed of the forums compared to the old ones?
I just went to custom items forum, and all MY previously loaded text files look like they were added without the code or spoiler function!
The overall speed is much faster than the old forum. The only thing I’ve noticed taking some extra time is when I post an image. It seems to take a while; in fact, on my last post I did two images and it took several minutes to post.
Ben does all the fancy stuff, but I added a “log in” link to the menu bar!
And Exporting is now working again. Though it was Ben who fixed that …
Meanwhile *I* … um … added some links to the sidebar. Fancy. >:-(
That’s because we’re using different forum software. The import isn’t going to pull over stuff exactly like it was. You can edit your old posts and use the new functionality in order to restore the previous appearance. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Oh ho. That’s definitely worth checking into. Thanks!
Thanks, guys; I was getting withdrawal.
Is it possible to move the Sub Forums below the posts of each parent forum ? For example in the Pub there are 3 sub forums; Favorite Books and Book Recommendations, Word Association Threads, & Newbie Safe Haven. Currently those sub forums are appearing above the very first post of the Pub itself, I think it would be better to have those forums appear below the list of Pub Threads/Topics.
Hate the new format with a passion. All my formatting is gone, as are my profile pic and signature. Text is too small and boring and indistinguishable from everything else (except for links and images). I can’t tell where one post ends and the next begins. Where is all the color and formatting that the old forum used to have? And no preview button on forum posts? I have to post something and then edit it if I don’t like how it looks? And I can’t see where the text box is to even begin writing a post! And I could keep typing sentences that begin with “And” to demonstrate how much I hate the new forums, but I’m too tired right now, so tell me how to fix this or fix it yourselves if you can because again, I hate this.
Thank you.
Timedrop, thanks for sharing your concerns, even though they weren’t put very diplomatically.
Like everything else, this is a work in progress. The entire system is new, but whatever its other faults it has one overwhelmingly positive advantage over Simple:Press — it doesn’t crash the entire site every few minutes. So even though you hate it, at least you have something you can look at to hate 🙂
It appears you are unable to edit certain posts.
I believe someone mentioned it earlier but I thought it was worth sharing again. 🙂
BBPress, by default, locks down comments for editing after a certain period of time. I’ve now set that time to a decade, so you should be able to edit anything. Let me know if that’s not the case.
Um–do we not have PM-ing anymore?
. . . does it just delay posting our threadwork a few hours?
. . .
I don`t know if you’re working on this, but it appears the spoiler function has stopped working/does not exist in the new software.
i.e. All the stuff that was under spoiler is now showing, which is horrible for posts where people “spoilered” the HM3 text file.
No PMing until I build it in, nope. It’s on the list.
And I don’t know about delaying posting — it may be that the caching engine we’ve put in place causes a slight delay. Which thread are you seeing the delay in? Can you provide a link?
It’s added to the list — thanks!
Thanks for your hard work, Ben!
Oh, thank goodness. I thought I just couldn’t FIND the PM function. Glad to hear about the spoiler thing being on the list too. They were contextually important to a lot of my work.
My gallery (Herr D’s CFLs) was the one that delayed, but I’m okay with it. I was just worried because my computer hasn’t been refreshing right.
Thanks, guys!
I just (most recently)posted this image in poses
http://www.heromachine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Ursala.png
, the thumbnail hit from the belly to the knee! Can we maybe make the thumbnail start at the head? IMHO it would look better!
I think I’ve fixed the problem with the thumbnails. Let me know if it’s still an issue.
Herr D, Some how your post to that thread got put in moderation and I had to approve and republish it from the Moderation Dashboard
Thank you, it fixed up nicely!