Important Announcement

[Cheebsy]

Hi stu and the rest of the team,

I can sympathize with your recent stress trying to run this forum without full control. I was part of the admin team for a water cooled pc forum many years ago. Like this place, it was regarded by the community at the time as the place to get reliable and detailed information about a very niche subject. We also had issues with software going out of support and databases feeling like they were about to keel over permanently.

I commend you on your action to try to migrate the community to a new home and I wish you the best luck. It's not going to be easy but worthwhile tasks rarely are.

Thanks for all you and the rest of the team do for this community.

 

[Fat Freddy]

There is SOOOOOO much valuable info here at FC in the areas of "how to" that losing it would be tragic, perhaps less so for the experienced vaporists but for those who are new to vaping it will make the learning curve extremely steep, perhaps even prohibitively so.

Is it feasible that certain threads be preserved by simply copying them and rebuilding them at the new forum? Sure, a hell of a lot of work but the work could be divided among members, yes? Maybe all of the info cannot be saved but perhaps the most salient comments/contributions could be saved that way?

 

[JCat]

There is SOOOOOO much valuable info here at FC in the areas of "how to" that losing it would be tragic, perhaps less so for the experienced vaporists but for those who are new to vaping it will make the learning curve extremely steep, perhaps even prohibitively so.

Is it feasible that certain threads be preserved by simply copying them and rebuilding them at the new forum? Sure, a hell of a lot of work but the work could be divided among members, yes? Maybe all of the info cannot be saved but perhaps the most salient comments/contributions could be saved that way?

If we just had access to the FC db, we could migrate ... oh well ... makes it more difficult, and I have done some preliminary investigation, but probably not feasible to migrate into current forum (at least not based on current time frame)

Might be able to migrate it another way though to an "archive" forum ... I have some ideas ...

 

[invertedisdead]

IMO the sooner we can transition the popular threads on here to fcombustion.com the sooner we can rebuild the island. It's threads like Dynavap, TinyMight, E-nano, Cheap bubbler, etc. that we just need to start migrating over, even if it means starting over as a brand new thread; as those type of threads already grow quickly in a short amount of time. That means they are popular, they draw in views and members, which we need the most for growing the community.

It sucks to lose any info because this place has always been THE time capsule of vaporizer information, but many of these vapes are no longer in vogue anyways. I guess that's natural selection; the vapes that are still the most relevant will bloom and blossom the quickest. I think those are the ones we really need to focus on.

I say we like I have some kind of control over any of it I think that's my third (person) volcano bag talking

 

[FlyingLow]

I am so with you Inverted! I was just coming in to mention putting the "Important Announcement" and sticky-ing it all over the top of every page. Otherwise, only the people clicking New Posts, or going into the Community Discussion Subforum see this important announcement. Let's put it everywhere to encourage peeps to make the move.

 

[Siebter]

I have one question (please): seeing that a few threads are blossoming at newFC, is it okay to open corresponding threads yet? For example a „Brilliant Cut Grinder“ thread at „Vapor-related Equipment“? Is there a best practice for that? I'm not sure whether it's wise to let two parallel threads rolling (which I guess is why you haven't opened the „Vaporizers“ subforum yet).

I'd like to second @FlyingLows question about announcing the new forum in ongoing threads to motivate everyone to move to the new place.

 

[pakalolo]

I am so with you Inverted! I was just coming in to mention putting the "Important Announcement" and sticky-ing it all over the top of every page. Otherwise, only the people clicking New Posts, or going into the Community Discussion Subforum see this important announcement. Let's put it everywhere to encourage peeps to make the move.

Patience, little grasshopper. We're trying not to get swamped. That is what we had planned to do.

I have one question (please): seeing that a few threads are blossoming at newFC, is it okay to open corresponding threads yet? For example a „Brilliant Cut Grinder“ thread at „Vapor-related Equipment“? Is there a best practice for that? I'm not sure whether it's wise to let two parallel threads rolling (which I guess is why you haven't opened the „Vaporizers“ subforum yet).

I'd like to second @FlyingLows question about announcing the new forum in ongoing threads to motivate everyone to move to the new place.

We will start closing down threads shortly. We want staff to handle the device-specific threads so that we can let manufacturers make the first post.

For the other threads, the protocol we'd like to see is that the first post in the new thread should contain a link back to the last post in the FC thread. If the thread is for a product made b y someone active here, then please let them have a chance to make the first post. When we close a thread, the last post will link to the new thread at NewFC.

 

[Vicki]

I’ve been playing around there, and I like the new digs a lot.

 

[FlyingLow]

Me too! I am ready to abandon old FC immediately for all purposes other than Classifieds.



These are exciting times Pak~ thanks for keeping this party going!

 

[vaporculture]

Mods, your efforts to save this community, and the knowledge-base that it has built over the years, is appreciated and to be commended. I would also like to find out how members can contribute to moving whatever is still relevant material over before the October deadline if at all possible.

Yes, Gmail does automatically place the confirmation email in the spam folder, thereby disabling the link it contains, but if you navigate to the spam folder, and uncheck the box that identifies the message as spam, it will automatically move the message into the inbox and the link will become active, although Gmail will still double check that you do want to visit the link when you click on it, presumably because the site is not yet "credible" in Google's index.

Again, thanks for all you are doing to make this transition work.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Thank you guys for doing what your doing and perpetuating this fine community.

 

[im not a robot]

you are probably aware of this already, but redirect from fcombustion.com to newfuckcombustion.com is no longer working for me ("An unexpected error occurred. Please try again later.") directly accessing newfuckcombustion.com is no problem.

 

[pakalolo]

you are probably aware of this already, but redirect from fcombustion.com to newfuckcombustion.com is no longer working for me ("An unexpected error occurred. Please try again later.") directly accessing newfuckcombustion.com is no problem.

Crap, I don't know why it stopped working. Looking into it.

 

[blokenoname]

Ok... and joined
iCloud mail doesn't relegate the confirmation mail to spam, FWIW. Goes straight into your inbox

@Stu @pakalolo

For archiving our FC Titanic here, you might want to look into software like SiteSucker (macOS):

"SiteSucker is a Macintosh application that automatically downloads websites from the Internet. It does this by asynchronously copying the site's webpages, images, PDFs, style sheets, and other files to your local hard drive, duplicating the site's directory structure. Just enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), press return, and SiteSucker can download an entire website."

https://ricks-apps.com/osx/sitesucker/index.html

That way, you can preserve the original site for offline reading on your HD and can figure out later on, how to best transfer the relevant contents to the new forum. No worries then, if.. or rather when we finally go offline here.

There should be similar apps for Windows and Linux, of course.

 

[pakalolo]

Ok... and joined
iCloud mail doesn't relegate the confirmation mail to spam, FWIW. Goes straight into your inbox

@Stu @pakalolo

For archiving our FC Titanic here, you might want to look into software like SiteSucker (macOS):

"SiteSucker is a Macintosh application that automatically downloads websites from the Internet. It does this by asynchronously copying the site's webpages, images, PDFs, style sheets, and other files to your local hard drive, duplicating the site's directory structure. Just enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), press return, and SiteSucker can download an entire website."

https://ricks-apps.com/osx/sitesucker/index.html

That way, you can preserve the original site for offline reading on your HD and can figure out later on, how to best transfer the relevant contents to the new forum. No worries then, if.. or rather when we finally go offline here.

There should be similar apps for Windows and Linux, of course.

Yes, we're looking at similar tools.

On another topic, as many of you are aware, despite removing every use of "fuck" in the new forum registration procedure and sending email from fcombustion.com, gmail is still classifying our confirmation emails as spam. If you find the confirmation email in your spam folder, there's a good chance that gmail has stripped out the link you need to confirm. You can try marking the email as not spam, and at least in some cases this also makes the link active. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do about this except post a prominent warning in the registration popup. The warning also includes a suggestion to use a throwaway mailbox at sharklasers.com, which usually works but at least one registration was rejected by the NewFC spam trigger. (We have a much better spam detection system now but this affects people using VPNs who wind up with IPs that have been used as spam sources. Some days you just can't win.)

Anyone who tries to register and does not receive a confirmation email within a few minutes should check the spam folder, and if you still can't find the email then contact either @Stu or me and we will approve your account. Thanbks for your patience, and apologies for the inconvenience.

 

[invertedisdead]

FWIW (1/3 of two cents) I use gmail and it came over in my regular inbox, so it's likely not affecting all Gmail users, for whatever reason.

 

[idboehman]

I've been tooling around with an idea of how to backup FC. Since we have no DB access and an absent admin slash an admin not interested in actually adminning, my thought process was to literally scrape every single page of the website, parse each page, finally ending up w/ a database formatted for SMF (SimpleMachinesForum) since it's open source, focused on security, and has an active development community. But since the migration has already started to "new fuck combustion" and it's using XenForo, seems we're stuck there, though thankfully it seems they aren't completely opaque about their database schema.

Issues I predict would be reconstructing the member database -- would probably need to make everyone guests initially like you've done. I envision something like there's a custom registration form for the new forum that has a "two-factor auth" way to link them up, i.e. during the registration process, it gives you a code/phrase to post somewhere on the forum to verify you own the associated FC account.

Would also want to keep drift from happening so the alternative/backup forum should only be writeable/postable/updateable by the sync process until the original FC time comes and the domain expires or the forum is hacked or whatever.

 

[MonkeyTime]

@Stu @pakalolo

Any chance the new site will be Tapatalk compatible? I personally do a lot of my FC reading on my phone, and I find it much easier through the app.

 

[pakalolo]

I've been tooling around with an idea of how to backup FC. Since we have no DB access and an absent admin slash an admin not interested in actually adminning, my thought process was to literally scrape every single page of the website, parse each page, finally ending up w/ a database formatted for SMF (SimpleMachinesForum) since it's open source, focused on security, and has an active development community. But since the migration has already started to "new fuck combustion" and it's using XenForo, seems we're stuck there, though thankfully it seems they aren't completely opaque about their database schema.

Issues I predict would be reconstructing the member database -- would probably need to make everyone guests initially like you've done. I envision something like there's a custom registration form for the new forum that has a "two-factor auth" way to link them up, i.e. during the registration process, it gives you a code/phrase to post somewhere on the forum to verify you own the associated FC account.

Would also want to keep drift from happening so the alternative/backup forum should only be writeable/postable/updateable by the sync process until the original FC time comes and the domain expires or the forum is hacked or whatever.

This is more ambitious than we had in mind. We don't anticipate building something that is another forum, even if it were read-only. We never considered trying to integrate FC posts into NewFC. I don't see linking posts to the members who are moving to NewFC as practical. By far the bulk of posts at FC were made by people who are no longer active. What we're trying to come up with is a searchable database of archived threads from FC, with a practical way to view them.

 

[Shit Snacks]

I've already been using the new site, but I just wanted to say I do miss this old fashioned graphic layout visual style (on my phone) for some reason, though I know I'm in the minority!

 

[pakalolo]

I've already been using the new site, but I just wanted to say I do miss this old fashioned graphic layout visual style (on my phone) for some reason, though I know I'm in the minority!

I have never understood how anyone can use FC on a phone, but I'm old.

What style are you using here?

 

[idboehman]

What we're trying to come up with is a searchable database of archived threads from FC, with a practical way to view them

Gotcha. Yeah my original thought process was basically attempting to migrate the entire site, history and all, to a new forum.

Gonna chew on the searchable database of archived threads idea and see what I can come up with. First thought (aka bad idea) would be a parser for the threads we want to archive that outputs into database w/ a search frontend that requires a registration (mostly to keep bots away).

 

[Shit Snacks]

I have never understood how anyone can use FC on a phone, but I'm old.

What style are you using here?

Haha yeah it began out of necessity at work and then it became my main source of FC! I actually need to switch over to a new phone, the new site will probably look even better there...

^this is how it looks for me now here

 

[Planck]

I've already been using the new site, but I just wanted to say I do miss this old fashioned graphic layout visual style

I much prefer the look of this compared to NFC.
It is much more readable.
Color, contrast and formatting are more legible.
All the icons are present, not little empty squares.

So we are at least two and I don't use a phone.

 

[Midnight Toker]

@Stu @pakalolo Thanks for your efforts guys. FC is definitely worth saving. Been a member here since 2012 and even when I've gone away for a while, this place has endured.

Just registered at the new site and waiting on my email.