Moving to New Server

EvC Forum is now running on the new server with no dependencies on the old. I decommissioned (deleted) the old server yesterday and it no longer exists (it was a virtual server, as is this one).The new server has a couple additional features provided by an updated control panel that make it much more secure. The reason we moved to a new server was because while investigating persistent break-ins I discovered that the OS on the old server was being EOL'd, and so we'd have to move because though I could continue using the EOL'd OS, software providers would no longer support their software on it. In fact, this had already happened for the server's control panel, which stopped receiving updates around a year ago, as also had the firewall, which perhaps created a weakness that was exploited to break in.The new server is running Almalinux 8.6. Almalinux is an open source version of Linux intended to fill the gap left by the EOL of Centos, our old OS. It calls itself a "1:1 binary compatible clone of RHEL" (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Hopefully it will be around for a long time.

Congratulations. Hardly any glitches at all. You made it look easy.

Thanks. The latest control panel features made moving the website itself over pretty easy. More challenging was becoming familiar with a bunch of behind-the-scenes changes related to security.

In a minute or two I'll be releasing minor changes that affect a lot of files. Please report any problems here.

I've just released a bunch of very minor code changes that affect a lot of files. Behavior of the discussion board is unaffected, but these changes make the code simpler and easier to support. Please post here if you encounter any problems.

Just so you know I am doing my part in testing certain functions I want to inform you that the "Do Nothing Button", while it doesn't do quite nothing, does function as expected.

When I use the Peek button on a message, it strips out the embedded newlines. The dBCodes do show up, but the entire text is one big run-on. Basically the same thing as if you wrote an HTML page without any <BR> or <P> tags.Same thing happens if I'm replying to a message and I click on the Peek Mode radio button.

Thanks for the tip. I've already fixed it.What follows may fall under the "more than you wanted to know" category for some people.This bug brought a larger problem to my attention. Older messages do not work with the new peek, so I'm simply going to rerender them, i.e., make them follow the same rendering rules as current messages.But this will cause a change in their appearance. For example, in the prior rendering all quoted sections were followed by double spacing in the rendered message, whether the original text had double spacing or not. In the current rendering the spacing after a quote is up to the user: he can use either single or double spacing, his choice.This means that an old message where the original text had single spacing after quotes was rendered with double spacing after quotes. When rerendered it will have only single spacing after quotes. If anyone objects to this type of change in old messages (older than a month) please post here.

As mentioned in the previous message, one of the changes over the past year or so caused old messages posted prior to March 15, 2021, to be improperly displayed when peeked at or edited in textboxes. For example, if this were part of the original message text in the textbox of an old message:

quote:

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This is statement 1

​

This is statement 2

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Then when edited or peeked at, instead of seeing the above just as in the original the user will see this:

quote:

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This is statement 1<p>This is statement 2

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I'm fixing this by rerendering all the old messages so that they appear exactly as originally entered when peeked at or edited. (For those unfamiliar with html, <p> begins a new paragraph.)At the same time I'm fixing characters that were misrendered during a period when the unicode standard was being gradually defined and adopted. For example, sometimes apostrophes would be represented by the characters "’", resulting in this example from Message 33: This will be rerendered as: Bare URL's (e.g., URL's that don't appear inside the [URL] dBCode) will also be rerendered. This will cause many URLs to change from being just the text of the URL into actual text. For example, this: Would become this: As mentioned in my previous message, the vertical spacing in old messages will also change in some cases. For example, it used to be that there was always double spacing after [list], but now the vertical spacing will be the same as what was in the original text. If the text resumed on the line immediately following the list then there will be single spacing, while if there were additional lines after the list then double spacing will be used. It's possible to have more than double spacing, but you have to do it by including HTML tags like <br> or <p>.I'll be beginning this rerendering effort soon, first backing up the database. It should take less than a day, but you shouldn't notice any performance issues or anything else.

The rerendering of messages has been completed. All messages are now editable and peekable.

Are dbcodes working? I tried using the quote feature today and it didn't render.Message: https://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=896850#m896847

​Yes, they are working.You used [\qs] where you should have used [/qs]

I tested a few configurations. Everything looks fine for me. I did a peek on yours and don't see anything. I'll look again.

Ahh. Missed that.

This was just posted at Message 13 in the Astrogeomanity - the periodic table of human evolution. pseudoscientific or not?! thread where it first came to my attention.Bare image URL's are now recognized by the software. You no longer have to write this: You can instead just write this: In each case you'll get this: When you use bare image URL's you won't be able to specify the width or the justification. For instance, this: Produces this: It wouldn't be possible to do this with a bare image URL. Image URLs that are accepted are GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, SVG and ICO.