The important bit first: yes, we will be importing all forums, topics, posts, private messages and attachments into the new version!
Expected downtimes during the upcoming days:
Sept 22nd/23rd: Website and forum will be offline for about 2 hours.
Sept 24th-28th: Forum will be offline for about 2 hours. Website may go offline for a few minutes.
This post will be updated with more exact times as the work progresses.
We've made plenty of custom changes to this forum over the past almost 16 years, some of which are being made irrelevant by the new software, others we've ported but some will not make it (at least not right away).
With over 4.6 million posts and 400,000 users this is a rather big task with many moving parts so changes to the upgrade schedule may be required at short notice.
What to expect?
A full conversion of our forum database takes several days to process, which is why we are splitting the work into two milestones:
1. [in progress] an initial conversion running on a copy of the database to get the bulk of the data in (this will take approximately two days during which website and forum continue to run)
2. an update import based on the latest data when everything is ready (much shorter, about 90 minutes)
This means there is a 2-3 day period where edits to existing posts or profiles will not be applied to the new database - I will post here when that period begins.
What are the changes?
Too many to list individually, but to get an idea of the features of the latest phpBB 3.2.3 forum software, you can check it out here: https://www.phpbb.com/about/features/ (not all features may be enabled for our forum however)
What the new forum will continue to have:
- all topics, posts, users and private messages
- game key registration
- steam link
- DevNet user data in profile
- most of our X-game related smilies
- spoiler BBcode functionality
- "ticky disk" for users(but it's the very next thing I will work on)
- "Show my registered keys" user profile option
- uplink stats/medals
- [url=http://forum.egosoft.com/search/index.html?template=default&style=default.css][b]Li[/b]nk[b]Li[/b]st[/url] (but fear not, the new [url=http://forum.egosoft.com/search.php][b]Se[/b]arch[b]Fu[/b]nction[/url] should be much better)
- the current forum styles (classic, Solaris, SpacePilot, Egosoft Modern)
- any tweaks that are no longer necessary with phpBB 3.2 of course
To avoid the nightmare that is updating a super-customised forum layout for future updates the new look will be based on the default phpBB 3.2 style "prosilver" with some alterations to get the look and feel of this forum back.
Here's a preview:
![[ external image ]](http://i.imgur.com/ACd2NcV.png){kind=link}