Introducing the new Sogna Digital Museum Forum

[JG]

Welcome to the new Sogna Digital Museum forum, formerly known as the Congress of Awesome.

First, a big thanks to Hyperguy for running the old Congress of Awesome for so many years.  He did a great job but he's decided to move on to other interests.  Rather than let COA die a sudden death when he decides to no longer pay his website host, he's graciously allowed it to become a part of Sogna Digital Museum.  So now the world's best VIPER forum is part of the world's best VIPER fan site!  But don't worry - we'll keep all the non-VIPER stuff around, too.

That said, I, JG, will be your new admin and webmaster.  I've been administering COA for a few years now as Hyperguy's right-hand man, and in the last year or so I've done the bulk of maintanence duties, too.  Those of you who have been around a while know that you're in good hands.

I've managed to restore almost all of the current Congress of Awesome functionality, including favorites like the ShoutBox, karma descriptions, and the spoiler tag.  The new forum is also running the latest Simple Machines Forum version, 2.0.2.  A vast upgrade over the 1.1.11 version used by the previous board.  They'll be a few differences, but overall it should be a better experience.

The one thing we definitely lost is the Now Playing field on profiles.  This was previously handled by a custom mod but is now part of the SMF core features, and the mod is incompatible with SMF 2.x.  Sorry, but you'll have to reenter your Now Playing information on your profile.

You'll also notice a different theme applied to this board.  The old COngress of Awesome theme isn't 100% compatible with SMF 2.x, so we're going to see how well this theme goes.  If there's enough demand, maybe I can come up with something close the what we previously had.

There are some other minor things, like smileys, that are outstanding, and I'll try to work on those in the coming days.

On the bright side, I did finally fix the long outstanding problem with karma points not matching the karma description log.  SOme of you will see a new karma value in your profile, which now reflects the actual karma log.

I have already preselected two members to be my new moderators, if they're willing.  The two members are both COA alumni, and I'm sure they'll do a fine job.  The two of you will receive private messages within a few days.  Only if one or both should opt-out will I seek moderation duties from anyone else, so don't bother asking.

Additonally, I'm going to be doing a massive reorginzation of the board structure over the next couple of weeks, to better reflect the Sogna/VIPER theme of this website.  Some boards will be split, some will be combined, and some may be brand new.  But again, I don't intend to delete anything.  Suggestions are welcome.


I encourage you to test drive the new forum, and reply below if you find anything that doesn't work right, something you're not happy with, or anything else you wish to comment on.

 

[Rai]

Not too shabby. Looking forward to the rebirth. If it means having Shoutbox, Carrerachan, and an active admin again, I think that's all it needs. More familiar colors would be nice, but no rush. Hope you can get the gamepad input smileys back.

[Cole Tyger]

place looks pretty good

here is a pile of emoticons if your still looking for them http://s15.photobucket.com/albums/a398/ColeTyger/smileys/

[JG]

If it means having Shoutbox, Carrerachan, and an active admin again

The first and third, you've got. 

I'm working on bringing the Carrerachan content over.  I don't want to support the Wakaba board though, so I'm working on dumping the Carrerachan content to SQL and importing it into the SMF databases so the Carrerachan posts will look similar to normal board posts.  That, combined with Guests being allowed to post to that particular board should satisfy all the original Carrerachan functionality, but be a thousand times easier to maintain.

[Arizona]

Hey hey, so now that you're Super God and all, can you change my name to Arizona?

[JG]

Hey hey, so now that you're Super God and all, can you change my name to Arizona?

Only if you own a unpainted furniture store chain.



Also, I've imported all the Carrerachan posts as threads in the Sogna Digital Musuem Forum.  I may have to cleanup and consolidate the threads, but at least its here now.


Update:
Cleanup completed!

[黒い灯影]

Awesome!! Can't wait to get this forum going...
sucks about HG moving on though...

I, however, will be around as long as there's viper merch to collect... especially original sketches...

[Arizona]

Only if you own a unpainted furniture store chain.

That's all we are to you people, huh? That one movie, the grand canyon, and the bill that lets you carry concealed firearms into bars ("What could possibly go wrong?").




...not that that's...actually all that unfair or anything... ._.

[JG]

I'd like to announce that 黒い灯影 has accepted the post of Forum Administrator.

I also encourage everyone to check out his new gallery.  That's some cool stuff there.  (Needs more Karin-chan though.)



Also, just out of curiousity, did everyone get the email notification about Congress of Awesome becoming Sogna Digital Museum, or did you stumble across here only by seeing the posts on the CoA?  I'm worried that gmail may have blocked a great many of the messages under spam control.  If this is the case I need to modify some email settings on the board so that it'll batch up emails in smaller groups and send batches less often, instead of back-to-back-to-back-to-back...  I got my email, but I'm so low on the assigned userid list (7th) that spam control wouldn't have kicked in by then.

[Arizona]

I got it, although I still use Yahoo for some reason. Didn't end up in the spam folder or anything either.

[黒い灯影]

I'd like to announce that 黒い灯影 has accepted the post of Forum Administrator.

I also encourage everyone to check out his new gallery.  That's some cool stuff there.  (Needs more Karin-chan though.)



Also, just out of curiousity, did everyone get the email notification about Congress of Awesome becoming Sogna Digital Museum, or did you stumble across here only by seeing the posts on the CoA?  I'm worried that gmail may have blocked a great many of the messages under spam control.  If this is the case I need to modify some email settings on the board so that it'll batch up emails in smaller groups and send batches less often, instead of back-to-back-to-back-to-back...  I got my email, but I'm so low on the assigned userid list (7th) that spam control wouldn't have kicked in by then.

haha.. thanks for the opportunity,
and.. strangely, I didn't get mine... but then again.. my hotmail address has been spammed up and shutdown by hotmail.
got a message one day, saying it has detected that something was using my email to send out spam..


also a strange thing though.. the shoutbox has disappeared, i don't know if it's just me or everyone..
yep, it's just me.. I logged out, and there it was... logged back in, gone!

[JG]

also a strange thing though.. the shoutbox has disappeared, i don't know if it's just me or everyone..
yep, it's just me.. I logged out, and there it was... logged back in, gone!

Oops.  Looks like Forum Administrator didn't have permissions to the ShoutBox, so when I changed your role, you lost access.  Should be working for you again now.


Please everyone, let me know if you find anything else that doesn't work the way you think it should.
(One of which is spellcheck... I don't know why that's not enabled...)

[Moge]

A fully functional forum... *sniff*

Never thought i'd see the day!

No last words from our dear leader? (Haypeguy)

[Rai]

He delivered suitable last words back in September:

In all honesty WoW is where I've been spending most of my time now.

Truer words from a formerly-active forumgoer were never spoken.

[JG]

I'm pleased to announce that Moquin has accepted the post of Forum Administrator as well.


Both of your new administrators were chosen for being long-time CoA members, who to my knowledge never had long "disappearing acts" while there.  They, along with me, have been the most active in the last six months or so - which is the primary reason why I selected them.

[Moge]

Happy to be among the selfish admin brigade.

Could we get some fancy color to signify this exquisite status to our names?

Shame Happygai could never get over his MMO addiction. He will be missed :'(

[JG]

Could we get some fancy color to signify this exquisite status to our names?

Actually, yes!  Your name will now appear blue in a few places around the forum, notibly on the ShoutBox. (Only works on new posts.)





Also, I guess its now obvious why the sudden move from Congress of Awesome to Sogna Digital Museum Forum.  If you've been by the old site's URL, you'll see its now down.  The story can now be told:

To be honest, we all got pretty lucky with this.  (Lucky being relative, since I had to bust my ass all weekend to migrate everything.)

The whole migration thing got rolling when I emailed HG about the Carrerachan disk quote full problem Wednesday night, and he replied Thursday that he wasn't going to continue the site past the 7th, when his yearly fee to his hosting service was due.  Its quite expensive and since he wasn't using the site any longer he didn't feel justified in paying for its continued use.  As soon as I got home from work Friday night I set to work.

The good news is that HG and I had had this conversation before.  If he ever wanted to close down CoA, he knew that I wanted all the VIPER content for SDM.  And just to be sure I could take it, I did a proof of concept about 2 years ago, sometime shortly after SDM had started, on setting up SMF on my server and loading the CoA database onto it.  So when he told me that if I wanted it I could take it, I set to work.  I just wish he'd given us all a little more warning.  You guys would have been in the loop and I wouldn't have spent an entire weekend working like a madman to make sure I got everything useful off the old site.  To be honest, I was worried I couldn't get it working in a single weekend (but I did)

Of course, it wouldn't have been at all possible had I not upgraded my server over Christmas.  So again, we got lucky there.

And of course, Hyperguy was gracious enough to share his hyperguy.net site credentials with me (He had already given me CoA credentials sometime back when we added all the banners).  This enabled me to grab all the content of Carrerachan and integrate it into the forum, too.

Yes, there are some things that aren't working great (performance the first day or two, as the caching had not built up yet).  And some thing's not working at all (spellcheck).  And some thing's that are going to take some getting use to (the new theme and colors.)  But overall, had none of the above happened, we'd be without a forum as of today -- and likely no way to get all the content, discussions, information, and images back.


But we're not quite done yet.  I'll work on spellcheck the next few days.  Maybe check out a few new features of SMF 2.0.x, to see if there's neat things we could do that weren't even a possibility on the old board.  Also, I'm going to work with Hyperguy to redirect congressofawesome.net to my web server, so the casual members and numerous Guests we had will be able to find their way here.

[黒い灯影]

WOW!!

So we just dodged a bullet there?

I did save a version of the site.. last year, but since I don't have access to the site's inner workings..
it would've been hell to recreate all the post/topic entries into a database format..
I used a site ripper so it's all in HTML format.
when I used to travel alot, sometimes I wouldn't have internet access at times..

Why not just transfer the address over to your provider? congressofawesome.net
and keep it as a redirector to sognadigitalmuseum's forums?



also
WHOO HOO!! Moquin, welcome to the "selfish admins".

I was going to say something else,
but I'm in the middle of processing videos and audio from a two day conference we just finished.
umm... i'll post back when I remember...  :-\

if you could get those old emoticons back, it would be great

[Arizona]

Seriously though, someone can change my name so I'm not stuck in an in-joke from seven years ago, right? :<

[Moge]

If this forum went into hiatus i doubt anyone would of mind.

Any chance Carrerachan will return?