update

work in progress, but the forums are MUCH better in the short term.

• I've cleaned up formatting a bit,


• limited the size of the avatar icons, many of which were dead and being redirected by virtue signaling image shack, and totally destroying our forums.



• sub categories show at the top,


• categories look a little cleaner
  

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I'm about halfway through the forum makeover.

what I am doing

• cleaning up/making compatible code in preparation for a move


• separating the html as much as possible from the logic

what I am not doing

• generally improving the logic of the forums, or rennovating


• * this is not to say it wont look better, but the internals will largely remain the same

you can go ahead and take a look. the categories page is now done, will try to get individual boards done next

The forums.

5000+ lines of insanity. One would wonder why I would have a penchant for pain, and the simple reason is , forums are generally good if done right!

so why bother?
The forums represent the last unfinished 'system feature'. Getting it out of the way, means I can start to proceed to fixing / adding features to the game.

As I stated before, I will not be doing a makeover on the forums. I'll save it for later. but what I do have to do is make it portable.

It would be very nice to at least salvage the work done here. Despite my hating on the forums. its obvious someone put some effort into them. what it lacks in elegance, it makes up for in richness.

The nitty gritty

The core problem with alacrity presently (amongst many critical issues) is that it runs on php 5. We are now on php 8. sadly, php changes faster than a snake sheds skin. Updates are not easily possible b/c of the servers age. its like trying to run a program designed for windows 95 on windows 11.

a secondary, but equally critical problem is the framework I designed is incompatible the chosen (and deeply flawed) methodology in the old system.

I knew going into this, that it would be a problem. but the trade off is the promised land on completion.

Please be on the lookout for any bugs in:
- news
- commenting on news
- left nav widgets (we

all 3 places received updates.

---The header file for alacrity has been cleaned up for insertion of test features, but its possible some things get missed.

--news changes:
- has been spot fixed, to be portable to the new server.
- all news files are now template driven, so that we can update the design in the future.
- 90% of the size of these files were reduced , and speed was greatly optimized (the code here was shockingly bad)