Ground Zero
On December 12, 2019 the SDG Forum had Sidekiq fail to remain operational. A few weeks later, the full ramifications of its downtime were realized and we worked to resolve the issue. With emails, notifications, drafts, and much more broken, we worked hard to bring the site back to its fully operational status.
This badge is awarded to users who endured the struggle – and survived. Welcome to 2020!
Discourse
- Updated to the latest beta version of Discourse, and the latest versions of Docker and all plugins.
- Users can now set a “Featured Topic” from their profile preferences.
Your featured topic will appear on your profile and on your user card.
Terms of Service
The Terms of Service (ToS) were updated on January 8, 2020. The changes were not substantial to the actual content of the ToS, but instead cleaned up formatting and readability by providing anchor heading links for quicker navigation, and the merging of the last two sections into “Changes” for simplicity.
Themes
- Replaced Vincent with Vincent II – a fork created specifically for SDG Forum usage. This fork fixes localization errors present in the original theme, and will be used to better manage custom CSS changes and smooth integration with plugins/components.
- Slightly adjusted various light and dark color palettes.
- Users can now quickly go to their “Interface” preferences via a “Theme Selector” button.
- Added a “Material Design” dark theme.
- Added a theme component for category icons, and added category icons to #unturned:u3-announcements and #unturned-4:u4-announcements.
- Added a live topic timer component that displays a countdown for the time till a topic closes or reopens (if the auto-close/open timer is not based on relativity to the last reply).
- Updated positioning of trust level avatar flairs.
- Removed a lot of unused or underused components.
Cleaning up the themes will make maintaining them smoother.
Creating Vincent II means that automatic updates will be slower, but Vincent receives very little official maintenance by the original creator nowadays, so it will be supported by SDG for SDG for the time being.
Material Design is a new theme for you guys to use. It currently functions as a dark theme, but that is subject to feedback.
Site Settings
New
- Updated the site description.
- Updated the short site description.
- Updated the governing law listed (Alberta law).
- Updated the city for disputes listed (Alberta, Calgary).
- Added “Bookmarks” to the top menu, to the right of the “Top” homepage navigation item.
- Tweaked category style (bar → box).
- Enabled automatic backups (default).
- Enabled summary digest emails (default).
Textual updates were for consistency and clarity. Automatic backups are being enabled as a part of ensuring the site has less downtime in the future for whenever such a major issue does occur again. Bookmarks have been historically nested away, so bringing them to the main page will help with relevancy.
Summary digest emails are being enabled as progress is made towards restoring email integration to users of the site.
Reset to Default
- Reset relative date duration (31 → 30).
- Reset top page default timeframe (yearly → monthly).
- Reset ignored users message gap days (31 → 365).
- Reset min first post length (10 → 20).
- Reset emoji set
(Google → Twitter). - Reset selectable avatars since the feature is not used by the site.
- Reset hide post sensitivity (Low → Medium).
- Reset cooldown minutes after hiding posts (5 → 10).
- Reset topic post like heat low (2.0 → 0.5). Standardizing to new defaults.
- Reset topic post like heat medium (2.63 → 1.0). Standardizing to new defaults.
- Reset topic post like heat high (3.62 → 2.0). Standardizing to new defaults.
- Reset discourse narrative bot welcome post delay (30 seconds → 0 seconds).
Some of these resets are for standardization with the newer defaults. The rest are to simplify the Forum setup.
Adjusted Towards Default
- Adjusted min topic title length closer towards default (8 → 10).
- Adjusted min title similar length closer towards default (5 → 8).
- Adjusted post edit time limit closer towards default (0 → 2,280). This applies to tl0 and tl1 users, with the number representing minutes.
- Adjusted delete removed posts after closer towards default (8 → 12). Number represents hours.
- Adjusted auto close messages post count closer to default (200 → 250).
- Adjusted cold age days medium (90 → 42). This change moves away from default, but only so that it works properly as others are adjusted towards default.
- Adjusted cold age days high (42 → 90).
- Adjusted solved topics auto close hours (168 → 336). This is the equivalent of 2 weeks.
These adjustments bring settings closer to the default. They are exploring the possibility of being returned to the recommended default setting, but are also being adjusted based on the previous year.
Trust Level 3
- Reset tl3 time period (120 → 100). This adjustment means that activity is checked more regularly. Requirements based on percent goals are easier (posts and topics read), while static goals are more difficult (likes given and received).
- Adjusted tl3 requires days visited towards default (80 → 60). This adjustment means that users only have to visit 60% of the time, rather than 75%.
- Adjusted tl3 requires topics replied to closer to default (35 → 20). This adjustment is to better accommodate the new time period for tl3 activity.
- Reset tl3 requires topics viewed (28% → 25%). Users will end up needing to read ~10% less topics than previously, but have a shorter time period to do so.
- Reset tl3 requires posts read cap (10,000 → 20,000). This was a precautionary setting, but the likelihood of reaching 10,000 posts is incredibly improbable.
These changes will make tl3 slightly easier to obtain and maintain.
App Maintenance
- Increased Unicorn workers from 3 to 4.
- Disabled Redis from the database.
- Fixed Sidekiq, and all corresponding issues.
- Replaced previous SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt.
Load performance should not be greatly impacted in any way (neither positive nor negative). May the site never break badly again.