Gyroscopic Investing

Hello,

We have a new forum host. DNS is being moved over so the IP address will go away after that happens in the URL.

Apologies for the delay, but the old forum hosting provider (Arvixe) was not repairing the DB and they had a lot of other problems. The new site should be a lot faster and hopefully more reliable.

If you have any problems with the forum, please let us know.

-- Craig

P.S. Yes, I see some characters from the backup are not showing correctly. They will just have to remain for now because the DB character sets have some problems after the restoration.

After fighting with SMF and DB backups/restore, I decided to move to phpBB which didn't cause as much drama. The forum is being slowly upgraded with avatars, etc. But most users will have to reload theirs prior to the crash.

Additional plug-ins will come along that will have a lot more features than SMF so stay tuned.

Please report any forum errors/problems here so we can look into them.

Thanks.

Thanks for all the effort, Craig!

Great to see the forum's back up and sincerely appreciate all the effort that went into it. Can't thank you enough, this community means a lot to me.

I don't mean to b*tch but will this current blue theme be the permanent one or will it eventually be replaced with another one? (Perhaps more similar to the one we had in the past?) I don't really like this one....

Great to see things up and running. Thanks!

Things are in flux. Just wanted to get something up. The theme, etc. may change. Right now I'm dealing with Russian spammers registering so I'm working on spambot countermeasures.

Geat job, craig!

I didn't see an RSS feed link, so please put that on the to do list.

I'm relieved there IS a "see all new posts" or "see all unread posts" function which was SMF's single greatest strength. It's up above on the left under Quick links. The only downside so far is after posting, you'll have to select it again instead of being brought back to the thread you replied.

The avatar part needs a serious ugrade. I had to shrink it by 77% and it was still too big!!! I'm a postage stamp now.

Avatars are now 100x100 and 16K in size.

Much better, thanks!

Can you do something to radically change the theme and colors? I keep thinking I'm in the Boglehead forum and it makes me want to puke.

MachineGhost wrote:Can you do something to radically change the theme and colors? I keep thinking I'm in the Boglehead forum and it makes me want to puke.

Maybe. The more I monkey with things the more likely there will be a future problem. But maybe colors will be played with. How about I make it look the interior of Breaking Bad's Winnebago?

Yeah here's another thumbs down for the theme. I really don't like how the badges for long threads are animated. It's super distracting. Overall the visual signal-to-noise ratio is high.

I updated the style. Honestly I don't have a ton of time to work on this. If anyone sees a phpBB style they'd like to try then post it here and we'll take a look.

Looking less Bogleheadish, thankfully!!! Can we swap the user's details to the left? Also, how come the smilies don't show up as graphics?

How about this theme? It looks mobile friendly:

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styl ... implicity/

Or, if that's too garrish, a muter one:

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styl ... elegance2/

But wait, there's more:

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/basic/

This one reminds me of SMF a bit:

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styl ... h_fresh_2/

Or, put on your beret and have a cafe experience:

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/latte/

This one looks less graphic intensive:

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styl ... a_phantom/

Similar:

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styl ... ltra_blue/

What's everyone think?

Is it me or does the fonts on this new theme seem blurry?

I also had to clear out all the deleted messages back to 2012 in my inbox to free up space for new ones. It was over 300% full. What a chore because you have to mark them all, delete, confirm and then click again to go back to the inbox after every page and you can only mark one page of messages at a time.

Agree with MG that text looks a bit blurry. And of those themes linked, the second seems a good balance IMO.

Here's an article on how to configure to open links in new tabs: https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... w-windows/

Again, appreciate all the effort Craig. Don't see the "donate" link up top here, but perhaps someone can post it in this thread?

Just testing to make sure I can post...

Glad to have the forum back, and grateful to Craig for his efforts.

The text is fuzzy in places because this theme is applying a 1px text shadow. So when the theme situation gets settled down it's just a minor CSS tweak (or a different theme that doesn't have it).

Ok I uploaded some new themes and activated them based on input above.

Other stuff like broken smilies, etc. will get fixed as I get time.

Thanks a lot Craig.

Dealing with Arvixe just about drove me crazy.

I would open a ticket with them, they would do nothing, and then I would be asked to complete a survey about whether the issue had been resolved.

Ah, this theme is much better!

Pointedstick wrote:Ah, this theme is much better!

Sure is. Quite legible!
No fuzziness.

I'm so happy the forum is back up.

I felt like Arvixe was just messing with me toward the end. Nothing against Indian tech people in theory, but the ones I dealt with were remarkably incompetent.

I'm imagining what some of those folks might be like if they were brain surgeons:

"So, thank you for visiting our hospital today. It will be my pleasure to operate on your brain. If we can be of any assistance in restoring your brain to normal capacity, you may contact us any time 24 hours a day."

And then the surgeon leaves the room and you never see him again. As your brain condition worsens, you receive a customer service survey asking if your brain surgery met all of your expectations.

Pointedstick wrote:Ah, this theme is much better!

Indeed, even the smilies are almost identical!

I don't like that the signature is same size (?) as the main body; it's hard to separate the two. We might need some more contrast or colors since its hard to see separate areas as well. But that's my only complaint so far.