So there's been a lot of talk about doing some upgrades around here. We have not been able to allow new members to join the forums for years now, and with FF14 chugging along, many of us feel that it's very important to overhaul the website and forums to give FF14 CKD the same sort of web presence (if not more) than it had in FF11.

In FF11, people were constantly wanting to join CKD, because they knew about CKD. We also had many people outside of the LS who would use our forums as their main external community access to FF11. We haven't established that for this game yet, so I think it's time that we do.

Regnar suggested that we come up with a list of features that we'd like to see for the forums/website, so that's what I'm doing here.

URL:
Yarrthepirate.com will forever be associated with CKD. After years of not coming to this forum, people are still likely to remember the URL. We've seen it numerous times with random appearances from old faces over the years.

That being said, it's probably a good idea to re-register a CobraKaiDojo of some sort. I'm pretty sure .com is taken, but I believe Regnar mentioned .net and another were available. This way familiar faces can still reach us with the classic URL, while new players of FF14 will have an easier time finding us with the new URL.

Forums:
People have not been able to register on these forums for years. The bot registrations are to blame, to be sure. While I'm a bit hesitant on this one, I do suggest we install a new piece of forum software. It would probably be difficult/impossible to transfer threads from one to the other, but it's probably necessary, just so that new people can sign up, and we can breathe some new life into the forums and make them more active.

SMF is a pretty hot piece of free forum software. It can do everything the current forums can (including quit posts at the bottom of threads), as a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get - like Word) editor, and there are a ton of add-ons that can be applied to the forum.

I really suggest you take a look at http://www.simplemachines.org/. I figure what we'd do is install the new forum under a subfolder of /forums/ and then leave this one available as an archive of information, but remove the option to create new topics. We can then link to the old from the new and to the new from the old.

Look at the add-ons for the SMF forum software and see if there's anything not included in add-ons that you'd really want to see in a new version of the forums. As it stands now, this is a highly-recommended forum replacement.

Website
So I've spent a decent amount of time working on a website for us to use for various things in addition to the forums. The infastructure is completed for it, and it's really just a matter of getting full approval from everyone to use it, and then just adding features as we need. I figure this site would replace the home index.php that Yarr currently has on its site, so it'd quickly get people to what we're all about.

But here is where we really need a list of features people would like to see on the website. I'll list what the site can do currently, and you all can give suggestions on what you'd like to see.

Super/Power Users:
* Can upgrade accounts to Admins.
* Can do everything Admins can do.

Admin Users:
* Can post news on the main homepage.
* Can create (reoccuring) events on the event calendar.
* Can do everything regular members can do.

Regular Users (CKD Members):
* Can edit their profile.
* Can view/sign up for private events on the event calendar.
* Can do everything Site Guests can do.

Site Guests:
* Can view the news on our home page.
* Can view our leve reset counter.
* Can view our member lists.
* Can view any other "Public" pages we create (About us, etc...)
* Can view any public events we have on the event calendar. (Not Implemented)
* Can use the link to our forums.

The only two things above really worth explaining (as the rest is pretty obvious) is the profile page and events calendar.

The profile page may be completely obsolete. Storing the UID for a player (as given in the URL on the lodestone) may be enough of a profile for our site. Originally I wanted us to store our own ranks on our site, so we could search for crafters, if needed. But I think putting up one of those cheesy signature images and a link to the lodestone page would be sufficient. Any Suggestions?

Secondly, the events calendar probably deserves a bit more explanation. Admins and above can create events with requirements in terms of body count. So they could create a reoccuring event every other Friday, for example, that needs 3-6 people. Or perhaps a weekly event every saturday that requires at least 5 people, but could have as many join beyond that as they want.

CKD members can then click on a day with an event, see a list of events, and choose to sign up for them. If something comes up, they can then remove their sign up. Calendar days with an event still needing people to meet the "minimum" requirements would show as red. Days with events where we do have enough peopled signed up would be green. And if there are more than one event, of which some have met requirements and some haven't, the day would show up as yellow.

The calendar is not displayed to guests by default right now, simply because even if they don't have access to click into a day to veiw the event details, I don't want outside competing linkshells to know what days we have events. I am thinking about implementing a way to create "public" events that would be open to the public. I would foresee these as primarily being things like PS3 launch days, major known patch days, Holiday event start dates and stuff like that.

Also, I'd like to get a screenshot upload system working, but I worry some about that, because PHP always requires files be transferred over to the server first before it starts any sort of testing to see if images are valid and such, and it's just always made me nervous. Tons of error checking is needed whenever we allow open upload options to the public. Even if we do restrict the option down to members only.

Thoughts, suggestions?

So far we have a lot of interest from Ket it in working on this, as well. Regnar and Kayne have commented some on such.

Yarr, can we please get some feedback from you on this? We don't want to force you to play a game you're not interested in playing, but CKD isn't CKD without this URL and such, and I don't think any of us would feel comfortable at all trying to do any of these changes on anything other than your webserver.

Edit: If anything, making a /FFXIV/ Subfolder and give a few of us accounts for it. I still think we should have the main site hosted on index.php, but I don't expect access to that. I can always give you the pages to upload yourself, if needbe.

Here are my main two suggestions:

http://yarrthepriate.com/ - Website Directory
http://yarrthepirate.com/forums/ - Forum Directory

or

http://yarrthepriate.com/ffxiv - Website Directory
http://yarrthepirate.com/ffxiv/forums/ - Forum Directory

Keep in mind we'd be adding a 2nd domain to the site, so cobrakaidojo.net would work as a substitute for yarrthepriate.com in any of the above URLs.

Talk to us, Yarr! hehe

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Personally, I'd prefer a site with just a forum with everything sort of built in (by add-ons or whatever else) instead of a separate portal site. In the past when i'm involved in a site that has a portal on top of the forums I find I always just skip straight past said portal and right into forums. But then, when I visit other linkshell's websites I generally don't even make it past their front page portal and go somewhere else. I don't like them, they feel like a barrier of entry to me.

I bet you can get forums, or add-ons for forums, where stuff like event scheduling is it's own subboard that you just post in (sorta like a poll) so you can talk about it and comment and stuff at the same time. With upcoming scheduled events and stuff appearing above/below the board itself. I dunno I feel it's better when the community is built around the forums themselves.

I'm sure I'm some kind of weird one-man nutjob on this. But my site vision is just a kick-ass forum.

SMF has a calendar built in, ket :P I'm telling you, it's a pretty sweet piece of freeware.

I still see some potential use for a portal page, but it's not nearly as critical to me as simply upgrading the forums, so we can get new members to easily join. If we did do a site, we could easily highlight and draw attention to the forums and make it quite clear that's the most active aspect of the site.

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You're not alone on this. I usually skip straight to the forum too. The only exception to this would be front page news posts like how BG did with the "loot whore of the month" thing. Usually front page blogs end up making a group look outdated. Most of the time blogs can sit for months before being updated, and I don't think anyone would really want to manage such a thing. I could be wrong though.

Other than that the forum should be the main page. Calendars, profiles, etc. are all good, but secondary to the usability of the forum.

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Retired 8/21/06
Don't click this link.

So it looks like we need to get a /forums/ thread made, then. Yarr should be a lot more safe giving us access to a subfolder, I'd hope.

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I'll admit, I had a look around on that SMF site and it sounds decent. Hope it's easy to modify because I definately want to try and do things like integrating lodestone stuff. Like adding those little job icons under people's avatars, and change the member list page (or add another one or something) so that it groups people by their job.

Yarr, we need to know how much you're willing to do

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

when did yarr ever log on to this site or game?

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PS3 Friend list name: Pantherxx Wii code 1629-0463-4657-0263 (revised 9/28/07) Steam ID - Pantherxx010 62BLU 75PLD Reactived 7/5/10 I dare you Click this!

http://www.mybb.com is pretty cool too :P

if you ever need help w/the website shit i can give you a hand, i haven't done much in a while, but some random shit i've done below:

site/back-end:
http://www.thephphub.com (Age of conan days... old)
http://www.depotcomplaints.com (Newer than above, but never got around to finishing it. <3 hobbies?)

back-end only:
http://www.nkalivas.net
http://www.perabellfoodbar.com (hella old)
http://www.martinflynn.com (basically all just html/js)

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SMF is good it used to be Yabb then YabbSE about hmmm 8years ago now, was good then and im sure its good now.

I think it would be nice to modify the code a bit to integrate a few FFXIV things into (such as the signatures it would be easy to parse the lodestone site for peoples stats) it but agree the basically a forum is all that's needed and perhaps a screen shots area to upload stuff into, also are there common things that are worth putting up like patch notes for people to read in a standard place?

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Kasdaye Regnar

Im open to suggestions. I think all of the ideas so far have been pretty good. I already pay about 100 bucks a year to keep this site going, but I dont use nearly as much capacity as I could.

Im open to giving people admin access to ytp.com. Like full admin that I have. Im a little nervous to do so, but I think I trust Ridere\Whisp\Ket\Kayne and others enough to give admin to them.

Also dont forget that I tried to upgradet the PHPBB2 forums to the PHPBB3 forums with this

http://www.yarrthepirate.com/phpbb3/

If you guys want me to install some software or you think it would be better to give admin to someone else then just let me know.

Sorry I havent replied to this thread. I left it off until today so I could sit down and give it a good read.

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COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

im happy to be an admin and stuff, but i dont offer much in the way of programming

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

I'm not fussed too much about the actual board software we use. Using phpBB3 means that we have an upgrade path at least. Which means we can easily keep all of the old forums, the old posts, everyone's profiles and postcounts, etc etc, which is something Ridere was worried about (making us look like noobs by starting from scratch).

I believe the upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3 doesn't actually delete the old forum, so we can just keep it for archiving's sake. Then delete the boards from the new forum that we don't really need anymore. Just keep the community ones like the IRL board and the general discussion and gaming boards.

If we do an upgrade we can still get rid of all the old bot accounts by deleting every single account in the database with 0 posts.

I wanna type more out but I got a wedding to go to. Be back later.

Sounds good. So at least we have some options now. If PHPBB3 offers all the bells and whistles that we could see ourselves needing, as well as the ability to customize the code directly if we can, then that may be the best bet.

Having a forum with new member counts is/was a concern of mine. I don't personally care what my post count is compared to all of you, but I do worry about new people to the game, curious about our LS, and only seeing our forum has 25 topics. It'd get built up fast, sure, but it's still a small concern.

Guess it's time to see what is available with phpbb3.

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Ill give access to the backend of this site to who ever wants to try and upgrade the forums. I couldnt get it to work

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COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

I was reading up on how to do it the other week. As far as I could tell its a matter of ticking some box while installing the forum software, then going back to the install folder and doing it again and a new Convert tab appears.

I can give it a try later when I'm home in about 4-5 hours.

yeah its not as easy as that. I mean you do that, but it fails.

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COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

I'll just assume I'm an "other" and let our friendship continue.

...but my circle of trust just shook a little bit. You bastard!

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

I dont trust rapest.

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COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

Do you remember if there was an error or anything?

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the problem was to do with how huge this forum actually is. You're basically asking a single click (one page request) to convert over 100000 posts. If it takes more than a minute (which it likely would) then your web host is likely to automatically cancel the operation due to protection from infinite loops and stuff.

Not sure how you'd get around that. I recall the forum help documentation telling you to contact your web host and ask if they can turn off the time-outs temporarily.

That's if that's what the problem is, though.

EDIT: Actually, there's one other way around it probably. You could download the site database, perform the conversion locally on your computer, and then reupload it all. But just how big IS this site's database?

Just a friendly /poke to remind Yarr that we need to get these accounts set up :D <3

Edit: And I'm still farting around on http://rosehusky.com/newsite for now. Got a working leve counter up there now. I know we may go to a forum-only setup with a good forum upgrade, but I'm going to keep plugging away when I can be torn from FF14, just in case.

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Behold!



Returns:



Having a little trouble getting the Physical Level. The function pulls data from the lodestone in Japanese and I don't really want to have to hardcode some japanese into it to make the regex work but it's probably the only way to do it without messing with the request headers to make it return in English.

what program runs that code? and returns the jobs

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

That particular code is PHP (designed to run from a web server -- ie: we could integrate this into the new forum) but the basic premise would work on any programming language that'll take a RegEx string.

This one pulls physical level too:



Returns:



Didn't know how to make the regex dot "." include new-line characters in PHP so instead I just made it do not tilde "~". Hopefully SE never put a ~ in the profile box or I'll have to change it, lol.

That said at least all we'll ever have to do it change the regex constants at the top.