Bork on the Dread's Forum

[bmn]

My apologies for not replying individually to bug reports. Been somewhat busy. Anyway, firstly I/we are aware of most of the problems on the forum right now. To summarise what went wrong:

• We updated the forum software last night - through a mix of only one person having access to the new version, a bit of forgetfulness, a bit of procrastination, it took us 5 months since the release of the current minor version (3.1, the board up until yesterday was on 3.0.6) to install what is now 3.1.3.
• Being updated software, some of the skin code has to be changed (patched) to match bugfixes, changes in how things are done, and new features, and the forum has a feature to do that automatically.
• However, the custom skins on SSMB had been edited so heavily that this updater was unable to accurately patch a number of the templates, including large ones like the forum listing, profiles etc, This left us with a fairly large (over 200) number of "conflicts" - where you have the old custom SSMB code, the new generic code, and you have to either choose one over the other or manually combine them, which can be a complex (and boring >_>) task.
• Currently, some of the Sonical skin is working fully with the new version of the forum, some has been switched to the generic code, and the rest is stuck on the old code. It's the old stuff that has made some sections (STATUS SIDEBAR BAWWWWW) look strange, and has actually broken, or partly broken some sections and actions.

Now, normally the obvious choice would be to painstakingly fix the skin/skins in question and go on with life. However, the previous skin wasn't even up to date with the 3.0.6 version - some features like Search didn't fully work, and (though you don't know this yourself, but I've been complaining about for about half a year to the Staff) the error logs are filled with gigabytes of minor error messages caused by seemingly invisible problems in the old forum. On top of that, what's to stop this from happening all over again when 3.2 comes out? I've got no intention of ignoring new features and bugfixes just so a skin will work.

Thus I have something else in store that I'm working on right now. It is a bigger job, however, and I expect it to take a few days. Until then, can you guys keep it chill and basically put up with the weirdness for a bit?

[bmn]

Other than the skin, the search daemon (a program on the server that serves all the forum search requests) has had its database structure updated. This fixes a few bugs including one that produces no results on the default My Content/x's Content page.

Whether these are fixed on the current Sonical, I don't know >_>

Progress on the new stuff is slow but sure.