Maker Forums upgrade complete 21 Dec 2022

Maker Forums has been moved to a new system to support its growth, and changed a bit as discussed a few months ago. Here are some highlights from the migration.

  • We have simplified the categories a lot.

  • The UI has been changed. The “hamburger menu” is now on the left, and controls a sidebar view, similar to many other pieces of software. The hamburger menu toggles the sidebar. You can configure what categories show for you in the sidebar.

  • We have more memory in the system (16GB) and can handle more simultaneous users

  • Database storage has been updated; the new system has faster storage as well as more memory for speeding up database access.

  • We have tremendously more room for images. We have 1TB just for images in their original form, and an additional 250GB for optimized, smaller images.

  • We are now running on Alma Linux 9, which means that we are able to use SELinux for security, and reboots for system updates take seconds instead of the minutes they used to take on the prior Ubuntu system.

Please respond in this thread if you have problems, and follow Maker Forums Admin (@owner@social.makerforums.info) - Maker Forums Social for updates or respond there with issues.

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One more change associated with this update:

We converted emoji reactions using the old, end-of-life “Retort” plugin (which allowed all emoji) to the new “Reactions” plugin that allows only a defined set of emoji, and considers them to be alternatives to a “Like” reaction. They are available through the :heart: box at the bottom of a post, and look like this:

image

I forgot to enable the reactions plugin at the end of the migration, so those reactions weren’t available for the past week. They are now enabled and are both visible where they were used, and available for use again.

Converting many emojis to “Likes” meant that several folks were awarded new badges by the system shortly after the migration happened, on the basis of emoji “retorts” that were converted to “likes”.

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