Forum Upgrade and Conversion

BeerSmith

BeerSmith

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Grandmaster Brewer
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This weekend I performed a long overdue upgrade, conversion and revision to the BeerSmith forum. I hope you enjoy the new forum! The old forum was getting long in the tooth, and also suffering from spam, security, bot and denial of service attacks.

New features:
  • A modern look and feel that is mobile friendly, easy to use, and interactive
  • Expanded boards to include more topics - please help by posting in the new boards!
  • Security upgrades - https:// to protect your passwords and privacy
  • New Q&A posts that let you ask a question and upvote replies
  • Improved private messaging
  • Social media sharing built in
  • Easily react to posts using the thumbs up button
  • Better notifications of new posts, reactions, and conversations (private messages)
  • Easy to post images and attachments
  • Easy to do markup and formatting on posts
  • Better marketplace
  • Dozens of other features
I plan to enable more features in the coming days and weeks as time allows.

Since we converted to a new software system I had to import the old forum. It went well with a few exceptions:
  • Many of the private message threads were truncated to the latest post. Fortunately there are relatively few PMs affected.
  • Unmarked link addresses in most posts did not automatically convert to links, though the link address is still present.
  • If you are the owner you can open/save a post to save the link
  • Some external links to direct forum posts will no longer work
I will have the old forum available if you need anything off it or some data did not convert properly - PM me for the link.

Thanks!
Brad
 
Last edited:
After a lot of work I wrote some custom scripts to get old topic links (only) to redirect to the proper new topic on the forum. This should allow most old direct topic links to work on the new forum.

Note you may still need to copy some links and paste them into the navigation bar on your browser, but at least it will take you to the correct post now!
 
Today I added a Media section as well as a Resources section. You can add images easily to the media gallery and create albums if you wish.

On resources, more experienced users can add new resources to the list and you can upvote existing resources.
 
A minor issue, but one of the things that prompted the change to the new forum is a series of ongoing Denial of Service attacks against the BeerSmith.com web site and forum. We are still experiencing these attacks a few times each hour, but virtually all of them are being blocked and filtered within 30 seconds or so of the start of an attack by our defensive software.

However if you experience a slowdown on the website, it will likely clear itself up within 30 seconds or so. I apologize, but as they are coming from random IP addresses it is impossible to stop them until they occur.
 
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