Looking For Help Finding Files

[Doctordick]

I keep a file of all my posts referenced by your "post number" (I do that because you don't make those old references available even though they are still in your database). I keep this file for the purpose of finding references quickly. (My file contains a short description of what the post is about and what might be of interest there. In the old forum, I could quote these posts via something like quote=Doctordick; 1172].../quote] where that number created a "spot" which one could click on to see the whole actual post. In the new forum, you are using something like quote name='Rade' timestamp='1281850884' post='298853'].../quote]. Is that number '298853' the post number? Can the "timestamp" be omitted? I haven't tried anything yet so any clarification would be appreciated. I have intentionally omitted the opening square bracket so you could see what I typed.

 

A second question I have is creating a direct ual to a specific post. In the past I used things like

 

A definition of what I mean can be found on url=http://hypography.com/forums/showthread.php?p=230775#post230775]this post/url]! (Again, the opening square bracket on the "tag" has been omitted so you can see what I typed.) This is exactly the way I would refer to any other url. That sort of think has worked in the past on every forum I have posted on but it doesn't seem to work here anymore. Do you have a way of referencing posts directly? In particular are those post numbers still usable or will I have to reconstruct my entire file?

 

Any help here or should I just trash my files?

 

Need an answer -- Dick

[Tormod]

Sorry, DD, that the conversion is not more automatic.

 

The old numbers should still work but for some reason not *all* links work.

 

So if you get a forum error I think you need to do this manually for now. I wonder if it's beacuse the new board doesn't understand that you're requesting to see a specific topic but provide it with only a post number. I'll have to investigate.

 

How to convert a post #:

 

You can use this format in BBcode:

[post={option}]{content}[/post]

 

So, for example,

[post=230775]Click here[/post]

 

Would yield:

Click me

 

That link will take you to the new address. Yeah, I know - it is slow and tedious.

[Doctordick]

 

How to convert a post #:

 

You can use this format in BBcode:

[post={option}]{content}[/post]

 

So, for example,

[post=230775]Click here[/post]

 

Would yield:

Click me

 

That link will take you to the new address. Yeah, I know - it is slow and tedious.

 

Can you give me any information about the actual url required to get to a specific post from outside the forum?

 

i.e., I am sitting at home and I want to take a quick look at a specific post to see if the information I want to talk about is in that post. Used to be I could access any specific post within two seconds. Now it appears that I need to log on to your forum, create a hypothetical post, insert that "code" set up, go to "preview post" and then click on the relevent point. Having then read the post I am looking for, back out of the posting proceedure being careful not to accidently actually create that hypothetical post! There has got to be a shorter way to get there!

 

Hope you can help.

 

Have fun (and I know you are) -- Dick

[capnrefsmmat]

Tormod, you may be interested in this:

 

http://community.invisionpower.com/tracker/issue-24164-vb-showthreadphp-redirect-script-doesnt-handle-all-links/

 

That'll cover nearly all of your broken links, I'd bet.

[Tormod]

Cool. That means it's a confirmed bug. I don't have access to our forum's code because they're encrypted (I can only change the look and feel, and modify things via an admin panel).

 

But that post should mean that it will be fixed in an upcoming release!

[capnrefsmmat]

Oh, you're doing IPS hosted software, I see. Yeah, Jason at converters is pretty slow (I think he's a part-timer for IPS) but he gets stuff fixed when he has the time. We had some conversion bugs that have been open for several months. You might just ask support to apply that hack I gave in the above bug...

 

Also worth noting that I may be releasing our LaTeX plugin sometime soon, with mhchem and all that. Presuming you can install custom BBCode plugins and they'll install LaTeX for you, I guess... we host on dedicated, so I dunno what IPS does.

[Tormod]

Thanks cap'n, I don't know what they'll install for us, I haven't really thought about that. BBcode is no problem, we solved the intermittent LaTeX problem by using an external service via BBcode.

[capnrefsmmat]

As I understand it, though, your external service doesn't support the old [ce]equation[/ce] tags, or [imath]inline math[/imath]. Or the popups.

 

I just packaged and released our system, though, if you can convince IPS to let you run LaTeX.

 

http://blogs.scienceforums.net/capn/2010/08/26/releasing-ipblatex/

[Tormod]

Fantastic. I'll check. We may eventually return to a self-hosted solution but for now I simply don't have the time...

[Tormod]

As I understand it, though, your external service doesn't support the old [ce]equation[/ce] tags, or [imath]inline math[/imath]. Or the popups.

 

I have sent a request to IPS to see if they can install ipblatex on their hosted community. If not, we might consider switching to a managed server somewhere else, because I agree that the ability to post equations is fairly essential here at Hypography. :)

 

I really appreciate your assistance cap'n refsmmat!

[Tormod]

We had some conversion bugs that have been open for several months. You might just ask support to apply that hack I gave in the above bug...

 

I asked in the thread in the tracker, but I'll make sure to post a ticket too.

 

Presuming you can install custom BBCode plugins and they'll install LaTeX for you, I guess... we host on dedicated, so I dunno what IPS does.

 

They appear unwilling to do this, but I have been forwarded to their hosting dept. I am used to dedicated so it's a bit strange to not just ssh in an fix things...I'll wait for their final reply and see what our options are.

[capnrefsmmat]

I asked in the thread in the tracker, but I'll make sure to post a ticket too.

It's possible he hasn't released a new version of the converter package yet.

 

They appear unwilling to do this, but I have been forwarded to their hosting dept. I am used to dedicated so it's a bit strange to not just ssh in an fix things...I'll wait for their final reply and see what our options are.

Yeah, we run dedicated and it's a nice feeling. I dunno how permissive the IPS folks are.

[CraigD]

Can you give me any information about the actual url required to get to a specific post from outside the forum?

Sorry for the tardiness of a reply to this question. :(

 

As you may have discovered by investigating the actual links as they appear in your browser (hover over them, rightclick on link properties, or show source), you can use the URL

 

http://scienceforums.com/index.php ?act=findpost&pid={n}

 

(omitting the space) where {n} is the post number, to display the page of a thread with the specified post in it and position your browser page to the post.

[Tormod]

But isn't the problem still that since posts have new id #s, this might get you to the wrong thread?

[Tormod]

It's possible he hasn't released a new version of the converter package yet.

 

Redirection from old vb showthread.php?n#postn has been fixed and was available in the updated converter download package. Thanks for the tip!

 

The main issue now is that

[post]11111[/post]

bbcode references made prior to the conversion are not picked up by the system because there is no treatment of these links. So I need to find a way to update all references made in posts prior to the conversion and replace those ids with the new post ids.

[Tormod]

A second question I have is creating a direct ual to a specific post. In the past I used things like

 

A definition of what I mean can be found on url=http://hypography.com/forums/showthread.php?p=230775#post230775]this post/url]! (Again, the opening square bracket on the "tag" has been omitted so you can see what I typed.) This is exactly the way I would refer to any other url. That sort of think has worked in the past on every forum I have posted on but it doesn't seem to work here anymore. Do you have a way of referencing posts directly? In particular are those post numbers still usable or will I have to reconstruct my entire file?

 

DD, this has now been fixed, all your old URLs should work fine. :(

[capnrefsmmat]

Good to see that one of the two dozen bugs I reported in IPB after the conversion had an impact :-p

 

I'm not sure how you could redo old BBCodes, apart from running a script over every old post in the database that uses a regex to find the BBCodes, then queries the conv_link table to replace the old post ID with a new one.

 

That would require a regex call on every old post in the DB, plus a query for every use of the post BBCode.

 

Ouch.

 

Alternately, you could replace the BBCode with a PHP BBCode plugin that parses the BBCode differently depending on the age of the post it's in. I dunno if that information is available to the BBCode parser, though.