Patrick

So glad to hear that! Thanks Brian.

Thank you for the kind words, @ashworth! Happy to accept them and acknowledge the wider team at the same time. Also glad the new software is growing on you!

Getting excited!

Thanks so much for mentioning this, Ken. You did not make a mistake. I believe what happened here is you experienced a new feature here, which is that the software will try to save your current draft in the event of an error. So, for example, if the website went down or your internet went down, and the post didn't go through, it'll try to save whatever you wrote at the last point it was connected. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it will save some posts.

Hey all, With the launch of the new KarateForums.com behind us, I thought it would fun to periodically shine a light on a new feature and talk about how it works. Technology-wise, our community was the same for a long time, and there are so many new things that were added in this update. Most of them will be simple, straightforward additions that hopefully make your experience a little better. Some of them might be a bit bigger than that. Follow Topics Today, I wanted to highlight the Follow Topics feature. I will use the words topic and thread interchangeably here. On our old software, you could opt to receive email notifications when a thread had a new reply. This new feature operates similarly, but you have more options. You can receive notifications via: Email, like before Notification list (the community-based notification system represented by the bell icon at the top of our site) Push notifications, if you have them enabled on your browser or mobile device You can set these options from your Notification Settings, which are accessible via the Account Settings link, which you can find by clicking your username at the top of the site. I'll include a screenshot of that this area looks like below. Where to Find Follow Topics At the top of each thread, you can find a "Follow" button that will allow you to follow a thread without replying to it, which is handy if you are interested in a conversation only as a reader. It looks like this: You might be wondering, how can threads here already have followers? That is because we wanted to respect the choice members made to previously follow topics here. So if you had previously subscribed to a thread on our old software, you should still be subscribed to the thread. You can also find the option to follow a thread when you are creating or replying to one. Here's what that looks like: Customizing Your Settings If you want to automatically follow any thread you create or reply to, you can do that, as well in your Notification Settings. I made a deliberate choice to leave this off and put it in your hands, effectively making it a deliberate choice that you can make for yourself. By now, I think we are all used to communities and platforms that want to addict us and turn various notifications on my default, and we only notice them when they start flooding our inboxes or devices. That's not what I want for this community. You can easily adjust your notifications at any time through our Notification Settings, which also includes the ability to silence all push or email notifications, each with a single click. I hope you have found this post useful, and if you have any questions about this feature of how it works, please feel free to ask them here. If you see a question you can answer, please feel free to do so! Thanks for reading. Patrick

This is the first Member of the Month that has been honored since we moved to our new software and with that comes a small (but I think cool) change: In the past, we could only display one rank for a member. So while someone was Member of the Month, their rank in the forums could not be displayed. But now, we are able to display both at the same time. So, if you look at any of ashworth's posts, you'll see both the rainbow Member of the Month bar, but also the belt rank based on post count (which is currently Brown). It looks like this:

Hello, Thank you for visiting KarateForums.com. We recognize one member every month as the KarateForums.com Member of the Month for their positive contributions to this community. Our honoree for June is... @ashworth for the fourth time! A month from today will mark 18 years that ashworth has been a member of this community. Ashley, thank you for all of the incredible contributions that you have made here! I appreciate how you treat other members and the welcoming environment that you help create here. Thanks, Patrick

This is how I always pictured you in my head.

Thanks for the kind words and for mentioning this. The reason they are displayed more than once is because they have more than one short code. For example, the green one with the big smile can be accessed from all of these: :D :-D :grin: I can see how that is a little oft-putting. I am not sure I can do much about it without breaking past uses of two of those. But I'll keep it in mind in case I see a solution as it isn't ideal. Thanks again.

Thanks Bob!

Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you saying that.

Thanks so much, Liam, Ken, DarthPenguin, and Zaine! It means a lot.

Thanks for mentioning this! For now, I'm just leaving some placeholders there for the possibility of ads. We've always had them but they I think Google may have stopped serving ads for us a while back, so if they come back, I didn't want to spring them on anybody like they weren't already there. But again, appreciate you mentioning it!

Nailed it.

Don't worry about it! Glad to see actual people here. Thanks Ken.

Edit: Resolved! I'm getting this message when I try to submit login information: I believe this will go away as the SSL certificate sets up, but noting it here so I can come back to it.

Hey all, Was anyone actually reading the updates I was writing? I'll have plenty to say about the new software powering our community in the coming weeks, months, and probably years, but for now, I want to be brief, so I am get the community back online and so you can start using it. We've been planning this for years. I was literally looking at email conversations I had in August of 2021 yesterday, as I tried to figure out a particular issue. In the time where we have been working towards this, I got married, and we had a son who is now 2. You grow, and you add new commitments to your life, and it's hard to juggle things. But this migration is so important. Our old software was going to die. Sooner, rather than later. One day, you would login, see an error, and that might be it. I did not want that to happen. I've been managing this community since it launched, for over 23 years now. I don't know if I have another 23 in me or not, but I do know that if there are members who find value in it, I want it to outlast me. That wasn't possible on our old software. Change is very hard. Especially change of something that has largely been unchanged for probably 21 years or so. Not just bugs or errors (please share those in this thread), but things that you don't like or something that is in a totally different place than you are accustomed to, which will be annoying. That is completely reasonable, and I'm sorry for the trouble. But I hope that the overall experience is improved for you. The ability to upload avatars has been broken for years. That is no longer the case. We've never had a mobile-friendly website. Now we do. Try it! You can actually upload images to posts now! You can tag people. You can react to posts. We've tried to be very thoughtful about those last two because I don't want this to become yet another place on the web that tries to addict you. I don't want members who can't stay away, I want members who find this community adds something to their lives. We'll get better, and we'll improve but crucially, we now have the ability to do so. We did not have that with our old software, not for many years. Before I wrap this up, I want to thank some folks: My friend, Chrispian Burks. @Chrispian here, who now has the honor (?) of being the first ever mention. Chris is my old, old friend, and I met him in an online forum 23 odd years ago. This simply would not have been possible without him. Chris has countless hours of his time to this project. It would have been dead on the vine if he wasn't in my life. He's not only a great developer, but a big believer in online communities and their power. His commitment to finding the right way to do this, the whole time, and not taking shortcuts, has been vital to this process. Matt Mecham, the co-founder and director of development for Invision Community. I would add in his team at Invision, too. Matt was generous with his time early on, giving me thoughtful feedback and tooling that allowed me to this the right way. Matt has been developing software so long, he was developing software when our old software was being developed. His ethos, the respect with which he treats online community content, is incredible and rarely seen in the community software space. His commitment to maintaining migration tools is to be admired. He is the reason your password works. That was really important to me, and it was important to him. The staff here at KarateForums.com: @bushido_man96, @Wastelander, @sensei8, @Nidan Melbourne, and @aurik. They've been a part of so many portions of this process, and I suspect at one point may have thought we'd never make it, as I let time slip by. But from reorganizing the forums and keeping them chugging along to testing the software and being a sounding board as I worked through various issues, their efforts made this better. The members who volunteered to test the software: @DarthPenguin, @KarateKen, and @Zaine. Thank you for your thoughtful feedback and support. Finally, and certainly not least, all currently active members of KarateForums.com for your patience throughout this process and the process to come. I am grateful for your patience. And I'll leave it there. Chris and I have been working on this pretty solid for now almost 4 days, and I think I might be a little quiet. Or not. We'll see. Thanks for reading! Patrick

Hey all, I know there will be broken links, issues, things that are missing, etc. I have my own list, ha. But if you come across anything, please use this thread. It may take me a while to review each one, just in full disclosure, but this will give me a good place to look, and I'll address them as soon as I am able. Don't be shy, even if you think it could just be an error on your end, I'd like to hear about it. Thank you for your time and help.

I thought it would be fun to have an archive of these somewhere! Here is what was written while we were doing the migration: KarateForums.com is currently offline for migration to new community software. This has been in the planning stages for years! Updates from Patrick will be shared here, in reverse chronological order. Thank you for your patience and understanding. All times listed are the Pacific Time (UTC -7). Monday, September 9, 2024 2:56pm: I have made it through the settings. There will definitely be things to set up and tweak over the coming weeks and months. There will be plenty of things that are a little off. A dead link here, a portion of text that no longer represents how the software looks. But we'll get there. The important thing is that the future of the community is more secure, that we are in a position to improve, and that it works. With that said, great news! I can now begin to bring the community back online. It'll come online for different people, but when it happens for you, it'll be clear! Thank you for your patience and your support of KarateForums.com. 11:26am: I'm about to jump back in again. As we are now in the normal Monday through Friday routine, my day is interrupted constantly by my 2-year-old, but I'll be dedicating as much time as I can to getting this done in between normal household tasks. Sunday, September 8, 2024 9:20pm: Please excuse my silence. I write to you from under a pile of options and settings. We've made a bunch of progress today, but I need to stop for the night. In the morning, back at the start of the week, I have some things to attend to, but then I'll be back at it. We are at the stage where there is nothing technical stopping us: The migration was a success! Now, it is simply the slog through configuration and customization to make sure the experiences matches with what you are used to at KarateForums.com. I don't want to launch with weird new things or features that make no sense. But as I look at what remains, it is certainly *possible* we could launch toward the end of the day on Monday. I am thinking Tuesday is the end point, no matter what. But I don't want to make any specific promises. Talk soon. 2:31pm: Alright folks. Things are moving along well. We are now at the point I teased this morning: Me vs. hundreds of pages of settings. Much of the experience on KarateForums.com is governed by settings. How should a new account be confirmed? When can a member send private messages? What happens if a member triggers the word censor? What rank image should be displayed? What should happen when a YouTube link is posted? Should it be embedded? And so on and so forth. I'm not exactly sure how long this is going to take, but I'm about to dive in. 1:01pm: Just another cryptic update here! We've accepted the reality on those page links, and will fallback to redirecting them to the first page. We're now working through those version upgrades that I mentioned in the last update. 8:31am: My developer friend that is helping me is on Central Time, so he starts a bit earlier than me and has already began for today to try to tackle that issue with thread pages and how the old links will work. If we can get that sorted, we need to update our new community software to a specific version, because it is the last version for our current version of PHP, a scripting language that powers the software. If that works well, we will then bring both the community software and PHP to to their most current versions. If that works, I'll test to see if passwords appear to be working, which will be a big moment. The last big thing will be me going through literally hundreds of pages of settings to ensure everything is set up. More on that later. Saturday, September 7, 2024 8:11pm: Whew, so the theme is done. I also discovered a separate issue. We want to redirect all of the old links to forum threads so that they will still work, even on our new software. But the code that we have doesn't cover the second, third, fourth, and subsequent pages of a thread. Which isn't necessarily something that would stop me, but is not ideal, so we need to tackle that. Work is stopping for now, and will resume in the morning. Given where we are, if things go smoothly, and we're able to reach the end, it is difficult for me to see us launching before Monday. But we'll see how it goes. Good night. 5:19pm: For theming, we have run into an issue where all of the colors that were selected (it's about 100) did not import. That means that I'll need to copy and paste color codes into the right fields manually. It's the difference between, say, 5 minutes, and 90 minutes. But here we go. 3:47pm: We figured out what was happening, and all of that is now sorted. It was a bit of a time suck, but I wanted to take a pause here to provide an update before I jumped into theming. That's what I am heading to do now. Fingers crossed! 1:33pm: We have hit an unexpected snag in the formatting of quotes in posts. This probably sounds silly, but this is an example of the minutae we've had to address through testing. We thought we had it sorted, and we did for multiple test runs, but for some reason, the methods we used in the last test run are now failing. It is sort of a perfectionist pursuit, as the impact is only the spacing between the end of the quote box and the next line of text, but we had it right, and that's frustrating. But we are trying to troubleshoot it. 7:41am: Today, we'll be starting at around 10am. The biggest potential time blocker today is customizing the design of the software. I have already done a lot of that work, so it essentially just needs to be imported but the last time we did that in testing, there was still some additional work required to have the software recognize all of the customizations. But it could also be a simple process, so let's hope for that one. Friday, September 6, 2024 10:11pm: Work has completed for the night. It appears that we were able to successfully import the data into our new community software. We're starting with an older version before we move to the latest version, for some specific reasons, but we're in good shape. Overnight, and perhaps into tomorrow, there will be some background processes running to parse through the posts and profiles, to ensure they are displayed correctly in the new software. But that won't stop us from otherwise making progress. 6:52pm: We successfully navigated the previously mentioned snags. It did slow our progress a bit, but were able to perform some of the tweaks needed to optimize the appearance of content in the community and ensure all profile data was correctly captured. We are still stuck in the intermediary application at the moment, but after we address one last annoyance, our next step will be to bring the data into the software we plan to use on the community. Thank you for your patience. 2:21pm: It appears that the data migration into the intermediary application was successful, but we're progressing slowly due to some random snags. The good news is that none of the snags are actually tied to the migration itself - more to do with web hosting issues and similar. 7:48am: Work has already started this morning. After migrating to the intermediary application I mentioned in the last update, we'll need to make a series of changes to address random quirks that have been introduced by our current software. The goal is to ensure that all posts display on the new site in the most attractive format - in the matter they should. By default, they have extra line breaks, broken links, etc. But with a handful of fixes, everything will look great. Thursday, September 5, 2024 10:15pm: We have completed work for the night. Everything that has been done so far has been focused on making tweaks to our current, old software to ensure that the data can be completely and corrected imported into our new software. In the morning, we will begin the process of importing that data. This will involve first importing it into an intermediary application through which we can then import it into our new software. Wish us luck! 7:18pm: Our community has been taken offline for migration.

It's pretty good. I'd recommend it!

Thanks Bob, DarthPenguin, and KarateKen. Much appreciated.

Thanks for the question, Ken. Sorry for the delay in responding. Your password should work. But if for some reason it doesn't, password recovery will be the next best option, as that will send you a message to the email address you have on your account, which will allow the software to verify it is you - and then you can set a new password. The third option will be to contact us via the email (you can also email me at patrick@ifroggy.com), but I take account security seriously, so I will need to somehow verify you are the account holder. As long as your email is up to date, you'll be good, regardless. Thanks, Patrick

Thanks for asking, Zaine and DarthPenguin. You know, it's funny, I think I may have read one or two in the past (trying to remember), but Moriarty the Patriot is probably the first one I'm following from start to finish! It initially caught my eye because of my general interest in Sherlock things, but I've enjoyed it a lot. I'm not against recommendations - especially if I can find them at my local library, which has been great about getting Moriarty as they are released in English (still ongoing).

Hey all, just wanted to say that we're still on track here. Going to be a wild, probably somewhat bumpy ride, but I'm excited to go on it! Thanks, Patrick

I mowed through a couple of things from the library in the last few days: Moriarty the Patriot 16 manga, which was just released in English on July 2. Stranger Things: The Voyage graphic novel, which I didn't realize, but was just released in July, too. This led me to put a hold on some of the other Stranger Things comics as they do some fun things to fill in the universe.