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OtLand OtLand's update to vBulletin 4!

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After months of planning and working, we have finally launched the update! There are still a lot of things to be fixed but I'll leave that for later.

So what is so special about this update?
The most important changes are the server move and the update to the new major version of vBulletin, 4. OtLand has been moved to a server colocated in Chicago, with a lot more powerful hardware than what our previous server had. We thank everyone that has donated to OtLand for making this possible.

The update to vBulletin 4 makes the forum more modern, using new technology for most of the stuff on the forum... but it has also brought us a new design. It might take a while to get used to it, and we expect to get complaints on it but we hope that you will describe how it can be improved. I would like to say thanks to Deavz, Chrsman and Hani for assistance with the styling, but most of the design credits should go to Holix.

We have also integrated a server list view which lists 10 random servers, and a subversion for projects supported by OtLand. Most of the plugins have been rewritten by me to fit OtLand as good as possible. The syntax highlighting plugin which only used to be available for Lua tags has been extended with C#, C++, Erlang, Javascript, Python, SQL and XML.

The forum structure has been revised. All the OpenTibia related stuff can be found below the OpenTibia category, such as resources and tutorials. A miscellaneous section has been added for support, and tutorials which aren't related to OpenTibia... and some other changes have been made.

The donators usergroup has been renamed to OtLand Premium which is a more suitable when we are providing benefits that most people who donate expect. This doesn't mean that OtLand becomes more commercial, the money received from premium subscriptions will still be seen as donations!

Everyones reputation points has been reset as we change the factors for reputation points with this update, we hope this doesn't bother you too much.

Kind regards,
OtLand Staff.
 
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The new theme isn't good looking. First time I saw it I thought I had arrived at otfans website, but thats just my opinion and we're all entitled to our own opinions, yer?
 
One thing I disslike with the new layout, is that there are no image prefixes. If I post a too large picture, it'll be automaticly scaled down, which results in very bad quality.
The former layout offered you to see the picture large, as well! As for now, we have to outlink to the image hosts page.

Please fix this, would be appreciated.
 
Why did it take you so long to make the few changes I see? :p
 
One thing I disslike with the new layout, is that there are no image prefixes. If I post a too large picture, it'll be automaticly scaled down, which results in very bad quality.
The former layout offered you to see the picture large, as well! As for now, we have to outlink to the image hosts page.

Please fix this, would be appreciated.

It's better to scale down the image rather than leaving it in its original size to break the forum layout, until we have ported the plugin we previously used to vBulletin 4 it will stay this way.

Why did it take you so long to make the few changes I see? :p

First, I had to learn the vBulletin plugin system, which hooks to use in what situation, how vBulletin cache templates, how the vBulletin cache system was built etc. After that I started writing basic plugins such as hide BB code from unregistered users, extended BB codes with Lua, XML and other tags, then there was the two bigger plugins, Server List and Subversion. The server list isn't really that advanced though, what took me most time was to understand how vBulletin "tables" were built. The subversion required a lot more code to be properly connected with the forum, and that took some time. As you can read in my posts in this thread, there was also a lot of software improvements involved such as switching to nginx from apache, percona from mysql, innodb from myisam, php-fpm from php etc. Even the template hacks consumed some time as I don't like how vBulletin has built their template. The way they are positioning controls such as the Reply to Thread button, the pagination is pretty bad in my opinion. There was a lot of work in this update, al though it could have been done within max two months it took this long because I was busy with school before the summer.
 
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