Forum Upgrade Coming Soon

[archibalduk]

TBL will shortly be undergoing a forum upgrade which will see us go from phpBB version 2.0.19 to version 3.0.8.

The main reason behind the upgrade is due to the increase in the site's bandwidth usage and resulting server move. As we (i.e. Octavian) are now having to pay for the hosting, it is extremely important that we reduce our bandwidth usage to a more reasonable amount. In addition, it should result in a more secure site (hopefully I'm not tempting fate!) as the upgrade will see five years' worth of improvements (our current forum software was originally released on 30 December 2005!!).

There is a vast number of improvements over the current site - far too many to list here! Not only are there the improvements in the forum software (you can see a very long list comparing version 2.x with 3.x here), there are improvements (mostly cosmetic) in our custom pages (such as the news pages, Challenge pages, Hall of Fame, etc).

The code behind the way in which the forum threads are displayed is particularly improved over our current forums (as is the code which displays the trophies under each user's avatar). I think there should be a noticeable improvement in the speed of loading threads. I hope to make the navigation header faster too. Not only this, but the forum has become somewhat bloated over the years due to the various mods that we have installed (and some we subsequently uninstalled). The forum upgrade is a chance to go back to the basic code without the bloat. I am quite hopeful that this is going to help keep TBL sustainable in the long term.

I'll be taking the site down on a Saturday (date to be confirmed) and hope to have the upgrade complete within that day. There is however a risk that it'll take more than one day as it is going to be a very a complex upgrade. The weekends tend to be the quieter time for TBL so hopefully this will minimise disruption.

I hope that the upgrade will take place before April - I'll try to provide at least a few days' notice. Nearer the time I'll provide some more details about the transition to the new site (unfortunately there will be some minor disruption to the downloads and blogs).