The Approching Transition - Dalibor's Future

[Zephyr]

It seems like jcink is our best bet. Seems like everyone is leaning towards it, since v5 looks to be a nightmare, and I'm in love with jcink. I sayyy let's move <3

[Rappu]

I'm extremely ok with moving over to jcink. It seems to be easier to use on a tablet than wwwproboard. I checked the flora thread you had posted and it actually adjusted to my screen! Yes yes yes, me gusta.

[Dragonwher]

I am all for Jcink as well. but how long will we have to move all our stuff? like applications and threads?. I'm only asking because my connectivity has gotten dodgy once again and I don't want to lose everything...least as far as apps go threads can be restarted after all.

[Lan]

Speaking as the person who has spent hours and days trying to figure out what the hell v5 is doing... I figured I should add my two cents...

Yes, Proboards v5 can look pretty amazing. And you can, indeed, go into the templates and theoretically make things look exactly as you like them. In fact, from the outside v5 seems to be more customizable and gives you more access to source code than Jcink.

The problem, then? Well... the source code makes no sense. There are some elements that have many contradicting style sheets bound to them and there is no reason or rhyme behind their naming schemes or order. Furthermore, there seems to be some aspects of the coding that are not practically feasible to change, as is evident by the lack of the 1px border on the right side of the banner. I do not have the patience to reiterate all the obnoxious things I tried to get it to show up... but it still refuses.

I don't know about the c-box issue Chek is referring to, but I am not exactly surprised. The code as a whole I found to be extremely temperamental, probably due to the lack of organization among their style sheets. Furthermore, the templates themselves use code more reminiscent of back-end coding than front-end coding.

Yet, even this I would have been fine to work around (with more time and some sleepless nights on my end)... had it not been for the default avatars that are seemingly impossible to remove or change. In a board that has never had required avatars before, this default avatar is an eyesore that does not blend well with our current color schemes and it's sort of... unnecessary?

Finally... the icing on the cake... is the "grouping" of accounts where by logging into one account you log into ALL accounts... including ones on other sites. This creeps me out more than anything... and it IS something that could be worked around... but the idea of logging in to ALL accounts and being dragged over to Proboards special log-in page before being moved back to the forum in question? It rubs me the wrong way. Also, I've found that when I've had a slow internet connection this process is not as "seamless" as I am sure Proboards has meant it to be.

That being said, Jcink does have some blips. It is not a perfect system, although it happens to be my current favorite to work with. Bre has already mentioned the security issue involving instating doHTML, which primarily has to do with the ability to change style sheets for the layout as well as the "hack" that allows people to institute Javascript into their posts. Because no one should really need to use Javascript, however, it should not be a problem to take this feature out and instead institute custom BBCode. I am willing to put many more man hours into making this work, if people are interested.

Furthermore... Jcink HAS had problems with DDoS attacks before. For the most part their new service has done a good job of preventing these attacks, but there are still instances where DDoS attacks have taken servers down for an hour or two. This has happened to a lot of sites in the roleplaying community recently, however, with DDoS attacks taking down even RPG-D for several hours during a day sometime in the past couple of weeks. These down times do not typically last for very long, however, and updates are posted on Jcink's Twitter. In fact, the recent downtime Jcink experienced was the first one in at least half a year, if my memory serves me correct.

Either way there will be headaches, don't get me wrong. However, Jcink provides built-in add-ons that Dali already uses and its use will be most similar to Dalibor as it is now. Furthermore, the customizable miniprofiles are sexy as hell and I've managed to use Javascript to allow the updating of said miniprofiles to be easier on the staff and, should they choose, could be handed over to the members themselves to update their own character lists. Perhaps with some elbow grease and more time v5 could be made into a site that we could use, but as it stands right now we do not have the time it would take to achieve this, should it even be possible to achieve.