Forum update

I haven’t mention much (as it’s largely technical tinkering) with regard to the Forum, but the new colour scheme (based on the Blog) seems to be working in terms of legibility, and I might try just one or two variations to see if they delineate some of the areas better than at present, but there doesn’t seem to be anything obscuring readability, so there won’t be much changing.

More interesting is the success that has been had playing with the Category currently titled Secret Scotland – Archive. This can only be read at the moment, but should shortly become fully accessible. The last hurdle was the ownership of each thread, which was generally wrong as it came from the old Forum Member List. Due to the file/data format, the correction couldn’t be automated (it would have been far too complex to code a search), so it had to be done manually. Oddly enough, although I could use code to find possible problem points, because that search is ‘dumb’, it turned out to be quicker (if more mind-numbing) to do it by eye as it avoided a lot of unnecessary search runs. The downside is it depends on the old eye to spot every instance, but errors were pretty obvious too, so it all looks ok now.

The content still needs a final check, and I’d like to shift any threads within it that are actually Discussions of Main Site Pages into the new Discussion board, together with a little pruning of any items that are not relevant, just to tidy things up a bit. This should also see the RSS feeds for Recent Posts etc restored too.

I have to admit there are still some boards ‘in storage’, and I can recover the threads in them as well, but these are also (especially the large ones) the boards that are not directly relevant to the site content, so there’s less motivation to spend the time on their recovery. There are still some necessary sections of the Forum missing, so the next step will be to install them, and then possibly lift some of the old data into them, provided it can be shoehorned in without taking too much time, as the site isn’t about how to code and recover data, it’s about Scottish subjects, and is lagging behind its real content, and I’d like that to be back to ‘normal’ operation by the end of the month.

Addendum

If you look to the right, you’ll see that my usual jinx of saying things are OK too soon has struck again…

There are two RSS feed from the Forum, one called Recent Forum Posts, and a new one called Discussion Feed.

As I write this, a glance will show that the Discussion Feed is working perfectly, however the Recent Forum Posts section is a dead as a doornail. Needless to say, I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to work out why one works and one doesn’t, since both are created using the same data sources and code. The only difference is that the Posts come from the original, restored data, however reading the feeds separately produces the slight irritating result that both feeds can be read perfectly well. Why the old one doesn’t appear here (or on the Main Site for that matter) is a mystery.

I’m a bit short of clues when it comes to debugging RSS, although why it should both work and fail simultaneously (and with two different code chunks) is no help in pinpointing the reason.

I’ve asked for help, and hope something comes up, as a fudge I tried in order to get round the problem didn’t help, so I’m all out of ideas at the moment.