Important info about vBulletin

[BradleyT]

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Ryan,

Any way of us, saving our favourite threads ?


vava

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LDO, my screenshot service.

Yours

[pvn]

When we switch over, can we get the following added to the smiley array?





kthnxbai

[Ryan Beal]

A popcorn guy, likely that one, will be part of the new smilies. Not sure about the other.

Vavavoom,

To clarify what I mean by losing your favorites, I'm just talking about the actual list of favorite threads in the panel not porting. Since it's only going to be 60 days worth of active threads that come with to vB, any favorites older than that wouldn't be useful in vB rergardless. PMs, favorites, posts and all the rest will remain as sort of an additional archive in UBB for the foreseeable too.

Also, those of you who mentioned you may have a problem if 2+2 stopped using a forum subdomain should be pleased to know that we did decide to keep using one.

[BradleyT]

Here's what you guys should do if you have access to a php programmer.

IN the vbulletin database you add a new table called old_favorites that has a user ID, thread URL, and thread title (user id and thread url are combo primary key). You write a couple line script that loops through each user ID in UBB and grabs their favorite thread IDs and titles.

You convert the thread ID into the proper archived URL location. For example a UBB thread ID may say 777634 so you'd convert it to http://archiveserver.twoplustwo.com/...read/ID/777623 (or whatever archive URL you guys are using) and insert that and the thread title into the old_favorites table for that persons vbulletin user ID.

Then in vBulletin you add a few lines to the "my home" php page that loops through the old_favorites field and displays a table of links to their old favorites.

It probably took me longer to type all this out than it would to develop the script. You just have to make sure each person in UBB has the same username in vbulletin so you can link their user IDs.

[Ryan Beal]

I'll take this up with Chuck. It may not be feasible since userids will change along with only using the display names. That may not be an issue with what you're suggesting, but linking userids through names seems dicey to me.

Regardless, at the end of the day spending time on getting UBB panel favorites into the vB panel doesn't seem useful. You're only dealing with a relatively small number of imported posts, and everything will still be available in UBB. The more worthwhile thing to look at would be the address book / buddy list.

[BradleyT]

Well the functionality can be duplicated for just about any feature that doesn't directly import which is a benefit to doing the initial code. Simply change favorite thread ID to whatever other field you want and the underlying looping, database reading/writing, and name matching code is already done for you. And for username, if you're unsure then you could do a match on username and password before inserting into the VB database.

What I described is really pretty simple (I'd expect someone halfway through an intro to PHP & MySQL class could do it) and shouldn't take a php programmer more than a few hours to get the code down. Then doing any additional field transfers should take an hour or less in modification time. If you do this, remember to set a huge page timeout value since it will take forever to loop through all 100K users.

And just because a thread is archived doesn't mean it's useless as a favorite. Think about the functionality of a favorite and why a person would prefer using it over using a web browser bookmark. Accessable from any computer at any location, doesn't take up any room in a huge list of bookmarked websites, won't be lost when you get a new computer, etc.

[Ryan Beal]

Bradley,

You'll still have the same favorites and everything else in the UBB panel, and parts of what you're saying aren't a way I would want to go about doing that for vB. For me this is less a question of whether it's possible than it making sense to add in the way you're suggesting. But I'll still bring it up after we're finished with a few other issues.

[RoundTower]

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The more worthwhile thing to look at would be the address book / buddy list.

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does anyone use this?

[Fast Food Knight]

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Also, those of you who mentioned you may have a problem if 2+2 stopped using a forum subdomain should be pleased to know that we did decide to keep using one.

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THANK YOU!

[Our House]

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Also, those of you who mentioned you may have a problem if 2+2 stopped using a forum subdomain should be pleased to know that we did decide to keep using one.

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Ryan,

Because of the sheer number of posters who use 2+2 from work (when they shouldn't be [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]), I thought you might find this vB.org template modification useful:



If your boss comes in, click "Panic" and you're redirected to whatever web page you're supposed to be viewing. The addon lets each user specify their own exit URL.

Judging by the responses about forumserver in this thread alone, a lot of posters have day jobs and most of them would probably love the mod.