WebmasterWorld BestBBS Software v6.5 Update
What's New:
- New notifications on navbar system
- New thread notifications in followed forums.
- Notification updates for new replies in threads where you are active.
- Notification for new replies in threads you follow.
- Reaction notification (likes) for your messages.
- New Private Message Stickymail notification message indicator.
- A active list (Recent Posts) notification indicator (lightening bolt).
- (v6.25): Added support for featured image links from urls in posts.
Other New:
- New Navigation bar at top.
- Added support for Material Design icons.
- Added icons throughout new navbar header and menus where appropriate.
- Moved home page from news/blog style back to the forums index page.
- Admin: added Stop Forum Spam database checking for registration.
- Admin: updated new support ticketing system for reported posts.
Forum Content and Policy Updates:
- We have decided not to pursue the large free flowing chat threads in the AdSense and Google forums any more.
- Deprecated about 30 forums that were past their prime.
- Rearranged and combined other forums and removed entire cateogries.
- Moved exclusivily to Bing as default search engine. (We receive our highest SE referrals from Bing).
- There have been some adjustments to moderation policy. (slowly loosening the reigns on everything but link drops)
Under the hood:
- Rewrote the entire navigation system set of routines.
- Redesigned the navbar at top.
- Rewrote page display routines moving from page 'templates' that were built in memory to html code produced on-the-fly (results - much faster with less memory used).
- Removed all old PHP template code and replaced with faster Perl.
- New versions of both bootstrap, jquery, and added ajax system for the notifications support.
- Moved to Brotli compression: [en.wikipedia.org...]
- Moved to HTTP/2 support: [en.wikipedia.org...]
- Moved to new server in May that triggered all these changes. (GoDaddy VPS if you must know. Extremely surprised and happy thus far).
Known Bugs / Broken :
- Need to debug the active list update routine (the lightening bolt icon).
- Indicators occasionally indicates new msg in private forum when there is none.
To do: - View all notifications routine needs debugging.
- Add mini icons for every notification on the notifications menu.
- Finish notification To Do: add support for drop flag/followed thread updates)
- Finish icon transition with the core icons.
- Add forum announcements to notifications
Notes This represents a major core system update and code cleanup. There was about seven weeks work. 133 of 375 scripts were updated.
Why Notifications? I've wanted a notifications system for quite awhile to keep track of stuff on the system. This should reduce the need for us to check our fav forums and keep up on messages we are involved in.
Cleanup on Aisle 9: The forum spam bots have been merciless for years. We averaged 100 signups a day from India - 99% of those were forum spammers. There was so much spam some days to deal with that moderators had a hard time seeing anything but spam and reported posts on the Active List. By adding the Stop Forum Spam IP and Email checks, we have really cut all that out to almost zero.
Server Issues: Moved servers in May to get off the overkill server (64gig memory) we had at Liquid Web. That change moved us to a VPS server that had 16 gig of main ram and two terabyes of M2 SD drive. The effect has been the new drive is much faster, but the system started running out of main memory and was having to disk cache main memory some times - which really slows the whole system down when you have to dump that much memory to disk. I felt that just throwing more memory at the issue should not be the solution.
Fixing: After code profiling, it became clear that the system routine generating pages was using large amounts of memory on every page view. I discovered that the in-memory template generation routines (written by others) mixed both PHP and Perl to produce a page. It would use variable substitution on a template that ultimately created many copies of the page in memory before sending it to Apache (
start another discussion if you want dive into that geeks). A large thread
could use (10-15 gig) of memory!
I rewrote all the mainline page routines to print the html code out to Apache at the time of generation and removed the entire templating system. The result reduced a simple page view from gigs down to about 10 to 300meg. Real-time overall server memory utilization average has went down from 40gig to 3.5gig. You really notice it in the large threads already.
That all said, overall, I like the new setup and some updates will be ongoing.
Thanks!
Brett
