Site Upgrade!

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skydancer

Bluelight Crew
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Oct 21, 1999
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We have reworked our site and upgraded to the modern forum package vBulletin. There are quite a few changes in layout and functionality. Apart from the new "skin", the following are the most important additions:

  • myBL, your control panel containing a buddy list, an ignore list, forum and thread subscriptions, and a lot of new options to customize the board
  • Private messaging
  • Polls and attachments
  • A more powerful user and post search engine
  • "Drugs in the Media" and the front page news have been merged; interesting posts from DitM can now be displayed on the moderated front page
  • A new "official" chat channel #harmreduction aimed solely at information and harm reduction
  • The links database has been improved and is now featured on the front page - submit your links!
  • You can upload your own avatar (1000+ posts required; EXPERIMENTAL)
  • More post format options, a few more icons and smilies

More or less interesting changes:
  • We now use a MySQL database with improved reliability. (no more 1920s or lost threads when two people reply at the same time) We will continue tweaking it in the next few days.
  • The login process has changed. Everybody who had a displayed name that was different from their login name, must forget their old login name and just use their displayed name to log in.
  • To improve security, registration is now mandatory to view the community forums; the public services (drugs & events forums) are readable for anyone
  • To protect your privacy, all IP address information will be purged frequently.
  • Moderator regions are now only accessible to current staff members.

Note: we had planned to install the new server hardware today as well. Unfortunately it could not be delivered on time, so we will replace it later on this week. It is possible that the site will be slow in the first days. We will perform some optimizations later, but we wanted to go live as soon as possible.

Update: everything has gone as planned and we have scheduled the server maintenance for next sunday around 15:00 (CET). Some logins were not imported properly; we are very busy fixing people's login problems and will tend to the less urgent requests after that.

Thanks to everybody who helped with the upgrade! :)

skydancer/BL
 
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Woot, nice work people! I like it.
Although I need to adjust for a moment hehe, where's the green.. :)
 
Its running noticeably slower for me but I say its well worth it. The new new bluelight looks great! And here I was thinking the servers were down for some bad reason. Hah!
 
Great job! :D Everything is at my fingertips, ahahahaha! Thanks!!

Peace
 
This new look
ROCKS! :)

Congratulations guys :)

Thanks for the avatars! Only about 100 or so more posts to go :) /cue spam =D
 
Note: it's probably painstakingly slow at the moment - The new design is heavier and nobody has the images in their cache yet, so we are maxing out our bandwidth "pipe".

Getting another account to host the images... Stay tuned.
 
THE FUCKING BEER ICON ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Its gonna take me a while to find a kewl avatar tho...

only thin that sucks is it takes FOREVER to load a page on here when im downloading from soulseek...for some odd reason (im on a T1).

other than that the new new new bluelight is kick ass!
 
Perhaps the site is slow because it was down for a few days and people are anxious to check it out / get back on bluelight.

I love the design and Functionality! Good Shit!:D
 
I just KNEW there was a reason I chose to visit today...

I luuuuuuuuuuurve you Skydancer ;)
 
So where are the Bluelight Personals?

I'm 22 SWM, athletic, intellectual, and I like to have fun. And that "fun" that I'm talking about is not a euphemism for any kind of activities that BLers might expect. Really, I like to have actual fun, doing fun things.

(Shamefully stolen from Dictionary.com)
fun n.
1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.
2. Enjoyment; amusement: have fun at the beach.
3. Playful, often noisy, activity.

I hope you got a good idea of what kind of person I am from my detailed description.

The new look is slick! Great job guys.
 
oh goody

new bluelight just in time to see the end of the world as we know it

go bush! 8( :|
 
rawk

Rock on BL admins. I like it. Hopefully it will prove to be a good solution. :)

-tourette
 
very very nice. thank you to everybody who helped do this!
 
avatars

You should change the avatar rule, to how long you've been on bluelight for, cause some of us don't spam this board 24/7 and comment on everything even if it doesn't have anything to do with us. Or make it a combo of time and/or posts.

I want my avatar dammit!! hehe
 
personally, I think the threads are too cluttered - one line replies get the same space as 10 line replies...it's unneccessary and I would like it a bit more clean and streamlined.

That complaint is just about appearance - I'm sure it can be done - the rest of the upgrade sounds fantastic...!!!
 
The text is TOO SMALL!. Love the look, but its hard to read, even on an okay sized monitor (cant imagine those poor folks with old small monitors). Please, please change the default text back to something easier to read - i think ull find many people are finding this hard to read.

And that point about the one-liners taking up as much space as longer posts is a reasonable point too.

Still , love the skin.
 
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