Change of skin?

[Matthew]

When I visited the forum today, I was logged out and the forum has a different skin. Is this a routine update?

EDIT: Oooh and I can see signatures again.

But non-ASCII characters no longer work....?

[Roboron]

I wonder how this happened since Isaac has been inactive for a while now. Can such a big update be automatic...?

It seems like it has reset my notification settings - I'm not receiving e-mail when a new reply is posted on a thread I was previously watching. This can be very problematic for people who rely on this for receiving updates on a topic

[Vladki]

Isaac is usually running stuff on Ubuntu. Maybe he got automatic updates to 22.04 lts (beta)

[prissi]

Somebody updated the forum this weekend according to the logs.

[jamespetts]

Yes, we now seem to be running the new SMF version. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost the Simutrans custom theme.

[Matthew]

On further investigation, it seems that Isaac has been in hospital in the last few weeks. He may have just had to run a quick update without being able to set everything up perfectly.

[prissi]

We also lost the simutrans image captcha (which station has a train ... ) for new users so I switched to normal captcha for now.

[prissi]

The theme is there, but it works no longer. SMF 2.1 changed too much. An_dz did the old theme. But I could not easily spot the differences.

EDIT: I just added the simutrans icons to the blue flatline theme to have a little distinct look.

[IgorEliezer]

Oooooh beautiful. I like the new them.

EDIT: As said, I also see the forum is not supporting non-ASCII fonts. Probably it's going to a major issue for sections like Chinese, Czech and Russian.

[prissi]

I think whoever did the update had converted the UFT8 database again into UTF-8. I cannot check this, since none of the logins in the admin section is working, they all point to updated servers of non existing logins. So I cannot download the raw database. However, if this what was happened, then one would run the database again through a converter and reimport.

There might be also the case that one just needs to run this query again:
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/UTF-8_Readme for each user, but that should have been done in the past. Again, I cannot check user entries, since I have also no myphpadmin access.

EDIT: However, new posts wie Umlaute and japanese together work,, so I think someone messed up the main database.

[Vladki]

Oh yes, the czech section looks like it was converted from iso-8859-* to utf8 twice...

[prissi]

I think the database is mangled with UTF8 and no UTF8 beyond recognition. There is nothing I can do about it anz more.

[PJMack]

UTF-8 and ISO-8859-* is usually distinguishable as UTF-8 has byte sequences not often found when non-English text are encoded using ISO-8859-* and Non-English text encoded in ISO-8859-* would likely have byte sequences that are invalid to UTF-8 decoders.  For example the English-French word Resume (With the accents) encoded in ISO-8859-1 would be 52E973756DE9 but the second an third bytes E973 are an invalid sequence for UTF-8.  The Wikipedia article on UTF-8 gives a better explanation to this and gives the details of the encoding. 

Fortunately there are several already written utilities for character decoding detection so it should not be too difficult to find the right one for the database.  If the database has multiple encodings within the same file, that could become a pain though.

[prissi]

Thank you, I do programming since before UTF-8 was used in any system, actually implemented UTF-8 support in SImutrans in 2004.

The database has been restored to UTF-8, when opening in an editor. However, the most entries are still converted into ISO, so there must be a flag somewhere to ignore UTF-8 per entry.

See for instance message 132627: https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,10538.msg132627.html#msg132627
and in the database it is utf8

[prissi]

OK, after some sweaty operations on the open datatable with several crashes of notepad++ handling 149 MB of database dump, I could reconstruct the database to UTF-8 for all posts as well as change the internal communication with the database server to UTF-8 which was (for unknown reasons) in Swedish?!?

This has cost me certainly several more grey hairs.

[Roboron]

Thank you. I like the function for changing the forum primary colour.

But my interface seems to be half spanish, half english .-.

[isidoro]

[...]
This has cost me certainly several more grey hairs.

Lucky you that have some stock to be converted...

[Vladki]

Thank you very much Prissi, for the encoding fix.
Unfortunately, user profiles are also messed up.
E.g. look at TommPa9

[Yona-TYT]

Lucky you that have some stock to be converted...

I still don't get the first gray hair hehehehehe 😅

[prissi]

I need to convert one by one tables by hand, sicne the database is too large for automatic. I will look into the profiles.

[prissi]

Members are also converted. This hopefully concluded my work.

[Yona-TYT]

Members are also converted. This hopefully concluded my work.

I congratulate you for your admirable work!


Unfortunately the new theme doesn't adapt very well to mobile devices I'm afraid.


This is where An_dz used to do his magic. 😔

[Vladki]

Thanks prissi.

 I think the forum looks good on mobile phone

[PJMack]

I noticed that warnings for concurrent posts are not working as they used to.  I missed a warning for one post, and when I was writing a reply, the warning only showed up once.  Hitting preview made the warning disappear and I was also unable to view the other person's post before submitting my own.

[prissi]

I think this is entirely down to the software, as SMF 2.1 is ratehr a major release taking 11 years development than just a tiny update. (Themes not working is a clear indication of that.) You would need to complain to SMF directly.

[Yona-TYT]

Email notifications have since stopped working.

[jamespetts]

Email notifications have since stopped working.

I had an e-mail notification about this post, so I do not think that that is right; however, you may need to change your settings about e-mail notifications, as some of these seem to have been reset.

[Yona-TYT]

I had an e-mail notification about this post, so I do not think that that is right; however, you may need to change your settings about e-mail notifications, as some of these seem to have been reset.

You're right I apologize, it seems that the email notification settings have been restored.

[Ranran(retired)]

The thanks button seems to be gone. But it was completely broken at some point...

[Yona-TYT]

In the recent posts Board and Date information no longer appears, this when it is opened from the mobile device.

[Ranran(retired)]

I thought the Thanks button and Thanks point display were obsolete in the new skin, but recently I noticed that James is using the Thanks button. But I can't see such a button. Also, I don't see any other users using it. Is this button limited to admin?

[Roboron]

Admins want thanks only for themselves...

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

I'd noticed that I could enable "thanks" in the forum admin (options/setup). Had no clue it was only admins. d'oh.

That makes it sound like it might have a permission, so I'll check that out and see if I can expand access to it.

Admins want thanks only for themselves...

Technically, it would be that admins only want to *give* thanks. hehehe

edit: Ah, there was a setting for membergroups allowed to use it - I've allowed all.