New forum, new server, new everything

Site & Project
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Welcome back monkeys! The place looks quite different, doesn’t it? Before we dive into the age old argument of black vs white, let’s look at all that’s changed.

New Server, New Infrastructure

Thanks to @jayfella diligently shopping around, we secured ourselves a top notch new server for free. Not that anything was particularly wrong with our current server, but it’s hard to compete with that price tag. It also facilitated a complete do-over of our server infrastructure, now based on Docker, orchestrated by @kwando.

It truly feels like a weight has been lifted, as we’ve effectively shed several tons of legacy cruft that has cropped up over the years.

New Forum

This is always the big’un. And it has happened a few times too many, and for that I can only apologise. Discourse is our attempt at settling our forum pains once and for all.

@jayfella and @kwando deserve a lot of credit for doing the groundwork and getting the wheels rolling. Then, this past week, @nehon and @david_bernard_31 went on lockdown in their respective basements, vowing not to see sun again until the migration was done. We will not speak of the things they did to survive.

All four of the aforementioned have been putting in countless hours to make jmonkeyengine.org in its entirety a pleasant place to be again. Thanks guys.

Migration Notes

  • All valid users have been migrated. Users with no posts and no activity for a long period of time were purged.
  • Passwords have not been migrated. To log in, you have to reset your password.
  • All topics and replies have been migrated with very few exceptions (ancient posts).
  • Ratings were migrated. However, the two systems had some fundamental differences, so compromises were made and some minor dataloss is to be expected. You’ll notice you have received likes from a mysterious individual called “ILikeWhatYouDo”. Do not engage with this person. He/she is not real and it will end in heartbreak.
  • Subscriptions, Bookmarks and Private Messages were NOT migrated.

About Discourse

Discourse might be a tad different from what you’re used to. Please see this introductory thread to get up to speed. Discourse accommodates many different workflows, so take some time to make yourself comfortable.

New Front Page

A new theme is in place to better match the dark forum styling, along with an updated “Showcase” section. If you have a polished game you’d like to see listed, @erlend_sh is your guy.

Build Pipeline is back in shape

While we’re on the topic of new and shiny, builds are fully working again! Poke @normen for more info on that if you so desire.

13 Likes
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This topic is now a banner. It will appear at the top of every page until it is dismissed by the user.

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Yay! It’s back at last! :smiley:

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Superduper exciting!

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It is Alive !!! Now where is that tutorial link :slight_smile:

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The wiki is not up yet. It’ll be available soon

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Yeah, I’m still new to JME and need those tutorials. :slight_smile:

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Press F1 in the SDK :slight_smile:

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Although I’m not a forum fan, I was missing this badly, welcome back!! All migrations are painful :slight_smile:

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With new emoticon you don’t look grumpy anymore! :smiley:

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Is it going to be the same? or any magic waiting?

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Hi! I love the new system! It is much more modern and up to date. It feels a lot more stable and I feel like I’ll enjoy using it!

That said, I think a light color scheme would look better on the website and would be a bit more inviting. I created a little mock up in about 10 minutes (using the web inspector on Chrome) of what I feel is a bit more inviting, if you’d like to take a look:

http://puu.sh/eA14f/cc41728d3d.png

Just an idea. It has room for improvement, I didn’t spend much time working on it. Thanks for all the work you have done so far!! This really is much better than the previous forums. :smile:

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To everyone that worked so hard to get my favorite website/forum back, thanks a million.
This engine is really a day to day place and with out it I feel lost.
Thanks guys for the last couple of years and great work.

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It’s been literal hell every trying to do stuff with this site down. So glad its back

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It’s going to be the same yes. But I guess we’re going to change the color theme to match this one.

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So you’re that guy…
We agreed that the first one complaining about the color scheme would be covered in monkey poo, to make an exemple. :hankey:

When we made the theme we had some disagreement on the colors to use, here and there, but there is one thing on which everybody agreed : We wanted a dark theme.

I can’t talk for the others, but here is why I prefer a dark theme :

  • Most graphics oriented application that I use use a dark theme. Blender, Photoshop, Substance suite, Gimp etc. And it’s of course a matter of taste but I found it very slick, pleasant and pretty. I really wish we had a (working) dark theme for the SDK.
  • That’s relaxing for the eyes. I spend a lot of time of the forum, and I found black on white pretty aggressive.
  • I wanted a change. And I guess I’m not the only one. I wanted something that was the opposite of the previous forum, because to be honest, with all the quirks we had, I came to hate it. Of course the slugishness of the old forum had nothing to do with the color theme, but my mind associated it with.

Erlend posted a question on discourse forum for user based themes support, and the answer was negative.

So I’m sorry but you’ll have to cope with this theme, because, we gave it a lot of thought and we decided it should look like that.

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Alright, I gladly accept the monkey poo c:

Just wanted to throw my opinion and idea out there. It sounds like you guys already thought it through, and I’ll just go with the flow on this one :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for the explanation!

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Even though I am an advocate for the dark theme, +1 for the mock up.

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Nice to see that the monkeys are back.