...Kanzenshuu...

[Goten Forever]

Half a month of forum downtime...
...for a website integration?

Considering the forum and website were on two seperate sites, lack of forward planning much? One could have run as the other was made or changed...

...meh.
But Kanzenshuu lookes promising, even if the name itself sounds a bit strange since it is Fusing two Japanese words.

[VegettoEX]

You note that there was half-a-month of downtime, which is mostly false -- both Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai remained up the entire length of the project, and we at Daizenshuu EX continued to update with news and produce content, including weekly podcast episodes, the entire time we worked on the new site. Kanzentai also had, while less regular, consistent news updates and new translation work.

What you're referring to was two weeks of just our forum being unavailable. While that's true, part of that was the surprise factor -- if we took the forum down the day before switching over, there was no way people would not have seen that as a clear indication something was coming on April 1st. We also had legitimate upgrade work to do on the database, so that worked out conveniently.

I think you misunderstand the amount of effort that's necessary to put forth into this type of project. The forum from Daizenshuu EX was a completely separate entity from the website itself, which had been in development consistently since 1998 -- that install of the forum was from January 2004. They did not speak to each other in any way. We were indeed performing integration tests while working on the new site, but it was impossible to do the necessary testing with the live database without tipping off the entire community and/or duplicating content in multiple databases.

It's totally fine if you're not happy with the end result, and I'd love to hear more information and details about what you think could have been different from a project management perspective -- that's not to say I'll agree with you, since this project has been heavily documented and milestoned internally for the past year pretty much the same way I would do any other professional website and corporate rebranding, but I'd still love to hear it and adapt the way we could have brought you what you think would have been a better product.

I guess I'm mostly confused over your apathy toward the whole thing, yet a strong-enough desire to post about it.

[Goten Forever]

I do like the things that can be brought forth from the linking of the two websites - it can only be a positive thing for both teams to work together - but I did not entirely understand why the actual forum itself was down.
Your explanation indeed helps and I thank you for it.
The reasons I posted the topic was to see if anyone else had any thoughts or knowledge regarding why the forum was down for so long but the website remained, and to see what people thought of the new site and what it can bring forward.
I am genuinely wondering about the meaning behind the website's name integration - on April Fools day I thought that this was the April Fools joke mainly because the title of the website felt like a gag name of sorts and rather too straight-forward, and quite unlikely to be the result of a japanese/DB-related word like the others. I could easily be wrong and in time the word 'Kanzenshuu' will be as familiar as 'Daizex' which is another abbreviation.

[MarcFBR]

I do like the things that can be brought forth from the linking of the two websites - it can only be a positive thing for both teams to work together - but I did not entirely understand why the actual forum itself was down.
Your explanation indeed helps and I thank you for it.
The reasons I posted the topic was to see if anyone else had any thoughts or knowledge regarding why the forum was down for so long but the website remained, and to see what people thought of the new site and what it can bring forward.
I am genuinely wondering about the meaning behind the website's name integration - on April Fools day I thought that this was the April Fools joke mainly because the title of the website felt like a gag name of sorts and rather too straight-forward, and quite unlikely to be the result of a japanese/DB-related word like the others. I could easily be wrong and in time the word 'Kanzenshuu' will be as familiar as 'Daizex' which is another abbreviation.

The word Kanzenshuu has been explained in a few places, including the podcast (assuming I'm remembering it correctly...)

The forum being down that long was explained by Mike, but to add to it- Moving forums, especially large ones, is not just a matter of hitting 'backup' and then copying it over. Large databases often like to act up when they are being moved around. And this one definitely did. First there were problems accessing it, so I had to reset some stuff when it was refusing to give lost access. Then it was a matter of actually backing it up, which as I recall kept glitching and took nearly a day. Then lost after a day or so got server access to the new server and uploaded it and Hujio was going to work on getting it 'up'. After a few days of issues with the forum not being... let's say helpful, the responsibility fell back to lost. And he was busy with other stuff that week... Then you had April 1st and the site launched, minus forum (I do know prior to April 1st Hujio tried researching and trying to figure out how to get it up, but the database backup just wasn't having none of it.)

At that point still had to upload the forum to the server because it was decided to finally host the site and the forum together (so it wasn't a matter of just re-skinning the forum while it sits on my server.) Then it kept glitching trying to re-upload it, which drained more time. Once it was uploaded it still had to be tested, add minor skinning, and checked for any potential data loss from the old 'forum' (since while it's technically the same forum, the entire thing effectively was moved 'brick by brick' and losing things wouldn't be a shock... and we did lose a couple things that aren't fully noticeable and are being worked on to fix.) As I recall, one of the things missing was nearly every forum setting, so those had to be restored. Mike and Hujio also had to make any changes to the forum they wanted before it was live again.

That takes up roughly 2 weeks (and that doesn't even include the 'moving tests' that were done on my server before we actually did it.)

[VegettoEX]

And then once it's ported as a forum, that doesn't even include integrating it into the actual website itself so there's a single login process (which you'll notice on every page of the website in the "User Panel" widget on the left), making sure that the forum and site software are talking to each other and passing the correct info back and forth, making sure certain things are cached while other things are not...

And we DID do test runs of it all on our development server, but it wasn't possible with the full database, never mind with a live version of it. We couldn't account for all the things that would crop up when it was the full database, but gosh darnit, Hujio sure tried!

None of this functionality existed on our site before. Fun times . We're all, like, modern and stuff.

[Hujio]

I have a couple points I'll throw out there, for the sake of... well, throwing them out there, I guess.

Firstly, moving and setting this whole thing up took a massive amount of time and energy. I know personally I sunk just about all of my free time into the site (you can ask my wife; she'll vouch for me). VegettoEX and MarcFBR pretty much summed up all the "fun" (I'm being sarcastic) we had with moving the forum.

Secondly, once we closed the old forum to export the database, we had to leave it closed for a very good reason. If we would have left the old forum up and people posted or created threads, it'd all be for naught, because those posts wouldn't have been transferred over to the new server.

Thirdly, what kind of a surprise would it have been if we took both sites and the forum down a week in advance? People would have figured it out pretty quick, and that's not what we wanted. I'm sorry you were without the forum for two weeks, as were a lot of other people, but that's just the way it had to be. And besides, there was no point in taking down Daizenshuu EX with the forum, since the two were somewhat mutually exclusive (they didn't interact in any way).

[Bussani]

I wasn't involved in any of the work, so I feel funny adding anything after the guys above have had their say, but the comment about a lack of forward planning instantly made me think of the Wiki project. In case you don't know, the plan is to have the accounts from the forum, the website, and the Wiki all be...well, the same accounts--the idea being that we'll be able to maintain a much more professional online encyclopaedia that way. The Wiki project couldn't truly come to fruition without first setting up this integration, so I'd say this has been an example of great forward planning that will surely benefit the community (and all Dragon Ball fans, for that matter) in the future.

[Fox666]

I am a little disappointed the forum still uses phpBB.

[GotenDaisuki]

I am a little disappointed the forum still uses phpBB.

I really like phBB forums. I think the forums have always looked great, and the design Kanzenshuu has (and Daizenshuu EX had) is really simple and works really well with the color scheme and overall layout.

[lost in thought]

I am a little disappointed the forum still uses phpBB.

Setting aside what our personal preferences are regarding forum software (personally, I've never been a phpBB fan, but it does work as intended after all) and in all fairness, the DaizEX forums were started on phpBB, and unless otherwise stated, there really wasn't any good reason to change that.

The problem with regard to forum software, especially as it pertains to whether or not you should continue using a particular package, is that they're all made very differently and function equally so, although on the surface it all appears to be relatively similar, 'under the hood' as it were, the means of achieving these results vary dramatically software-to-software, so what we end up facing in the consideration of changing software already in use, is that an existing installation or database backup wouldn't be compatible with a new piece of software, as it was created under the conditions relative to the original software. This is also where it gets hinky, because if you want to move over, you end up having to extensively modify the database to be fit for usage with the new software package, and this is even more difficult than the process of restoring a board in a variety of different ways.

It's actually relatively hard to explain just why that is, but perhaps I can do well enough by relating a story from some already past history here for you. Back when we moved the forum from the old server to Marc's awhile ago, one of my responsibilities ended up being to figure out some means of upgrading the woefully out of date phpBB software in use at the time, which was so old that compared to the modern version, the two were nearly unrecognizable, which meant that we couldn't just flip out to a new version. No, what it ended up becoming was an event that progressively spiraled out of control as I worked long days and nights trying to devise a solution that would produce the results we were after. In the end, there were dozens of road blocks, to the point where I ended up having to build my own solution to the problem to finally achieve any headway, taking into account of what resources were available to me, just to produce one solid result through a process that took hours upon hours to complete, and was horrendously prone to failure. Of course, one result was all we needed, and it was very likely more through luck than anything else that saw us through the last time. But after days, if not weeks (thinking back on that time, it's all a haze, I barely remember it I was so wigged out), we finally achieved our goal after many, many failures.

Granted, at the time I didn't have a lot of experience converting forum installations, so I know better now, but it remains nonetheless incredibly difficult process that's prone to failure, especially when you're dealing with a forum as absurdly large as this one. Quite honestly, to me the pretense of changing software at this late stage without a serious reason would be at best, insanity. This isn't something I would wish upon Mike and Heath, any more than I would wish to undertake myself. Of course, even with that being said, if they had wanted it, I would have found some way to make it happen, but I subscribe to the saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" it just wouldn't make sense.

Even though it's not really meaningful for me to say, I am sorry you're not happy with phpBB, but it works and I think Mike and Heath would back me up in saying that was the most important thing, especially after all the work they've done to get this far.

[Fox666]

I would not recommend phpBB because it is not very efficient or reliable. There are other free forums softwares like Simple Machines which offer a lot more possibilities. Of course boths works, just like Internet Explorer and Firefox. And nowadays there is plenty of solutions to convert the software of your forum.

[lost in thought]

I would not recommend phpBB because it is not very efficient or reliable. There are other free forums softwares like Simple Machines which offer a lot more possibilities. Of course boths works, just like Internet Explorer and Firefox. And nowadays there is plenty of solutions to convert the software of your forum.

Perhaps not, but after having used SMF for nearly 7 years consistently with another project, which has supported a load roughly consistent with Kanzenshuu's with largely consistent levels of performance, I am just going to step back and say they both have their faults. At one time or another I've used both software packages extensively, and I am just generally not inclined to say that one is particularly more definitively useful than the other.

There also isn't really a wealth of alternatives on the free front, many of the best free packages ended up changing to a licensing model years ago, and the outliers thereafter were invariably not up to the task in many ways of supporting large communities, and the exceptions weren't explicitly stand-alone forums.

As well, certainly there are plenty of solutions for doing the task. But just because there are a lot of utilities available doesn't necessarily change that it's difficult, tedious, time consuming, and inherently prone to failure the larger your forum is. The software works, certainly, but it still requires at a minimum the confluence of knowledge, ability, and physical resources to even manage to handle it successfully. The root issue becomes here, when you've got a forum as large as this, the real concern is the software being able to handle the workload of managing it at this size, and often without making special accommodations, the risk is quite high that it wont be.

Now, making those accommodations isn't necessarily difficult in and of itself, but even when those accommodations are made, there's still no guarantee of success. And I've already been in this position enough times to know that even when you've done everything right, the risk of failure is still high enough that you can't bank on success as though it were a given.

[VegettoEX]

I do wanna also mention that it's not like we didn't look at converting to other forum software (such as bbPress that I know someone else mentioned). This was a full-scale rebranding and restructuring process -- we did our due-diligence. It all kept coming back to two things, though:

(1) The forum (whatever software implementation it would be) was already the central login process and would therefore need to talk to the larger website as well as directly talk to the wiki software for authentication and management purposes, so that forum implementation would need to at least have pre-existing plugins and software that we could work with -- phpBB has that.

(2) The forum is fucking massive . Like lost and others are describing far more authoritatively than I can, when you get a forum to grow to this size, it isn't as simple as, "Hurray, I have a free software converter that will just take care of it for me!" It's a matter of, "Poor lost is writing things from scratch and staying up all night to manually convert things."

[DBZGTKOSDH]

So, what's going to happen to the old forum? Will the old link redirect here?

[MarcFBR]

So, what's going to happen to the old forum? Will the old link redirect here?

Poke Mike with a stick. I have a few times. I think he's missed it when I've asked.

I vote everyone just post about that.

[desirecampbell]

So, what's going to happen to the old forum? Will the old link redirect here?

It looks like the old threads still work, shouldn't be hard to create a redirect for any old links to the new domain.

So yeah, Mike. *poke*

[lost in thought]

It looks like the old threads still work, shouldn't be hard to create a redirect for any old links to the new domain.

Realistically, I figure there's probably a couple of reasons why we wouldn't want to keep the old forum running now that everything is launched and settling into place, so I've taken the initiative and threw up a very basic redirection that I use on the server for stuff that gets moved to point back over here and briefly explain whats going on. I imagine that will sufficiently satisfy needs for directing the outliers over this way.

So, yeah, there you go. Oh, and yes, posts will redirect here too.

[Fox666]

(1) The forum (whatever software implementation it would be) was already the central login process and would therefore need to talk to the larger website as well as directly talk to the wiki software for authentication and management purposes, so that forum implementation would need to at least have pre-existing plugins and software that we could work with -- phpBB has that.

I am quite sure that if you search for it, you will find one, and which would allow you to fully incorporate your site and forum. And the thing is, SMF is very friendly to the installation of mods, you enter in the admin panel, click in the mods sections, upload a ZIP file and it will install for you as long the version is compatible.

Either way, what bothers me is how out-dated PHPbb looks. No one use buttons with text today, the images and text are separate so you don't need to create a new set of images for a new language. Kanzenshuu doesn't need translation, but you got my point.

(2) The forum is fucking massive . Like lost and others are describing far more authoritatively than I can, when you get a forum to grow to this size, it isn't as simple as, "Hurray, I have a free software converter that will just take care of it for me!" It's a matter of, "Poor lost is writing things from scratch and staying up all night to manually convert things."

http://download.simplemachines.org/?converters

[MarcFBR]

Either way, what bothers me is how out-dated PHPbb looks. No one use buttons with text today, the images and text are separate so you don't need to create a new set of images for a new language. Kanzenshuu doesn't need translation, but you got my point.

That's a matter of opinion, and is specific to the normal theme. I happen to think it has some class (and I say this using SMF on my own personal stuff)

(2) The forum is fucking massive . Like lost and others are describing far more authoritatively than I can, when you get a forum to grow to this size, it isn't as simple as, "Hurray, I have a free software converter that will just take care of it for me!" It's a matter of, "Poor lost is writing things from scratch and staying up all night to manually convert things."

http://download.simplemachines.org/?converters

You seem to have either missed or ignored the point. The forum is so massive traditional converters do not work properly.


And speaking from experience. The vast majority of the time we've needed a plugin on SMF, it's been horribly out of date, or doesn't work nearly as well as it should. To the extent that even for basic things lost had to code them himself.


I personally prefer the admin panel in SMF. phpBB works perfectly well for Kanzenshuu's needs, and now that it's up, it really isn't going to be going anywhere.

You can keep trying to convince them to change their minds but the truth of the matter is. The sites up, it's stable, it's working. It isn't going to get a change like that for (most likely) years, if ever, as long as it works as they need it to.

Hujio would have to change stuff he did on the backend, lost would have to do all the conversion work on his own. It just isn't going to happen.

[lost in thought]

I am quite sure that if you search for it, you will find one, and which would allow you to fully incorporate your site and forum. And the thing is, SMF is very friendly to the installation of mods, you enter in the admin panel, click in the mods sections, upload a ZIP file and it will install for you as long the version is compatible.

Either way, what bothers me is how out-dated PHPbb looks. No one use buttons with text today, the images and text are separate so you don't need to create a new set of images for a new language. Kanzenshuu doesn't need translation, but you got my point.

http://download.simplemachines.org/?converters

Even though you're not talking to me, I am still going to take this opportunity to try and further explain the matter at hand.

While it's true that installing modifications with SMF is relatively painless (when they work), recent events have made relying on them to be an untenable situation. Not long ago SMF went from the 1.0.x branch up to the modern 2.x branch, rendering previously available modifications unusable, including many of those designed for the beta and release candidate versions, and while there are certainly mods still out there, they haven't all caught up yet, and ideally, if you're going to go about a project like this, one would prefer making use of the best available means of doing so, as opposed to settling for whatever happens to be available.

And that does no more than discuss what is needed for the sake of argument, in actuality the only official Wordpress mod is several versions out of date, and there is currently no wiki mod available. The fact that in so far, these things have proven to be available for phpBB makes it a better choice for their needs. Especially with this in mind, it really doesn't make much sense to go to all the effort it would take to convert the forum to a new platform that cannot, currently, support these minimum requirements.

As for your argument against phpBB, that's a pretty stickling point. While text-laden image buttons may no longer be in vogue, you've ostensibly invalidated your own argument by digressing that no translation is necessary. If no translation is needed, we begin to lose sight of the point of changing platforms at all, and what it becomes is you saying that they should change for no better reason than you like SMF better. Of course, there's nothing wrong with having a preference, but I think it's a bit much to expect anyone to go to that effort for no better reason than that.

Finally, I am not really sure why you're linking the converters, there was no dispute to their availability. The problem that I think we're failing to reach a consensus on is that you're effectively demanding a large scale change, that even with the software in use will still be an enormous job no matter what, and are either failing to or intentionally ignoring that point, perhaps because it doesn't suit your purposes.

As I said before, I am sorry you're not happy with it, but I think everyone would agree that the simple fact that the forum is able to and currently is fulfilling the stated needs, that its functioning as expected, is more important than looks or favoritism, or changing platforms 'just because'. Least of which without very good reason to do so.

Edit: Also, what Marc said.