Having two purposes: an ongoing log of my progress with this conversion project, and a kind of self-shaming instrument that will ensure I don't wander off-track any more than I already have (a lot). C, if any of you dicks actually read this, you will know what to expect when I set us up the bomb.

This will be a months-long process, which shouldn't surprise anyone who's aware of the fact that I first started talking about this in 2005. (2005).

(Incidentally, I highly recommend browsing through the forums. As part of this conversion process, I keep digging up old threads to make sure shit is converting over properly and finding the most awesome shit I had totally forgotten about.)

I'll bump this thread when I've updated it. (I'm calling all LS content streams threads now, even the stuff that isn't in forums. It's the cool thing to do. You don't have to also be cool if you want to suck dicks -- that's fine.) If you want to bump this thread too, go right ahead. I'll point out that this exists and trust that will factor into any of your decisions in a smart, also cool way. What would be nifty is if every couple weeks, when you notice it's not in the Journal Shite block, you bump it, thus reminding me in case I've forgotten.

08/06/2007
-Most of the actual conversion tasks are now automated via an increasingly lengthy Ruby script; this means I can rebuild a testbed in about 10 minutes and don't forget the odd shit here and there. This is the hook that's gotten me back in the game, since writing the Ruby script is actually more fun than having to make the thousands of tiny judgments involved in deciding how I want to go with the new system, which is bewildering, as though I am literally in a wilderness.

-100% of the forums are maintained, and some old cruft (the \' and \" business, for those of you that remember that period) is cleaned up in the process.The new forums will be BBCode-only. (Don't freak out. It's easier than HTML, so it means more of you will actually get more control over your posts. There's a WYSIWYG option, too, so you can point-n-click your way to pretty worthless Internet self-publishing garbage posts.) The only HTML that isn't being preserved properly that I can find is Youtube embeds, which are sadly ubiquitous enough that I have to think about them. Right now, a Youtube embed comes over as a hyperlinked URL. I imagine the horde of you care deeply about the ability to embed a Youtube video directly into the page, so I'll swallow the bile and try to find a way to do this.

-100% of your average user profile comes over intact. I got non-Alpha avatars sorted out last night. I need to work on the 'Extra info' and 'bio' fields, and then I think user profiles will be set. This kind of update is probably too trivial to really mention and I only do so here because this is novel and exciting and I haven't let it slide off the front page into memory yet.

-Private messages are retained. I was messing about with marking unread any message younger than two weeks, to give you something to play with when we eventually roll over to the new system, and then realized I had more pressing shit in life to do than mark private messages unread. So I finished, then moved on. Bonus random tidbit: no more "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:" infinity shit in lengthy PM conversations. Other random tidbit: Owing to the way the conversion works, if you've sent Rowdy Roddy Piper a PM and he hasn't deleted it, that PM will be sitting in your Sent Messages folder. Other other: There is a Sent Messages folder.

08/07/2007
-User fields now incorporating 'bio' and 'interests' fields.

-Incorporated the raw link, link-category, and link-comment import routines. There's a wide swath from the end of 2003 where evidently hostnames were recorded without being resolved. Resolving them now is largely a losing proposition and is certainly annoying to wait for.

08/08/2007
-Convert process now running link comments through the convert_html_to_bbcode process.

08/09/2007
-Trying to figure out why THE FUCK the [img] tag is being treated as a [url] only during link-comment-preview time. (Rejoice, link comment previews, faggots.) Having zero luck figuring this dogcrap out.
-Something's fucked with the link-category-import routine. Categories aren't being recognized unless I make them manually.

08/10-13/2007
-Holy fuck, such crap. Before I spend hours painstakingly disassembling a chunk of code, I should probably make sure that the radio button that controls whether it spits out "yes" or "no" is actually set to "yes" if I'm currently confused that it's spitting out "no" no matter what I do. On the bright side, [img] bbcode tag now works in link comment preview. Go fuck myself.

-Now users (e.g., Alphas) can edit their own links and link comments. Mods will be able to edit others' links and link comments. Need to figure out how to log and display those edits -- we want to continue to make it clear when things have been edited, to avoid Beachgoat Madness. Need to put a timer on it so that people aren't coming back to rewrite history more than a couple minutes from post-submit time. It'd be neat if I could figure out a system that either A) stored a history of all past revisions, like wiki does (convenient, frees us to edit whatever we want whenever, kind of stupidly grandiose idea that isn't worth the effort), or B) compared the requested edit with the original post and only allowed a small percentage of total change, to discourage large-scale rewrites (would require some kind of edit-counter with ceiling, otherwise you could just edit 2% 50 times). Both these ideas are neat but basically stupid.

-I had salmon last night and there's more for tonight ^__^

08/14/2007
-Figured out how to store and display link-comment edits. Have to tie logging in to actual edit. Some link comment images aren't converting over properly?

-Added some hooks for XRay. Robustified xray model a bit to allow for differing levels of detail.

08/16/2007
-Figured out the link comment images not coming over are Imageshack images, inline, without the fancy linking code. For some reason, the clickable thumbnails come over, and even the unclickable thumbnails, but not the straight image source embeds. If I'm looking at this, now might be a good time to write a routine that scans posts for off-site image links, pulls them local, uploads them to the uploader, and replaces the reference in the converted post with the new internal-to-LS link, so that we never look at missing images again.

08/21/2007
-Now properly logging all link comment edits so they work just like the forums. You can edit any link comment within a couple minutes of posting it and the post will show the edit time.

-Conversion script more automated now, and accepts runtime options letting me test subroutines of the conversion process singly or in full. (Note for posterity: in Ruby, command-line options seem best handled through the Highline gem. Everything else is verbose or wonky as shit.)

-Added a few straggler tags to HTML-to-BBCode routine. Fixed last imageshack issue. Still not sure how to tackle Youtube/etc embeds. Will need to think it over. Mofo, thanks for ideas so far.

-Not sure I'm going to bother downloading all remote images linked ever and rewriting posts to point to internal upload destination. Does anyone care?

08/29/2007
-Now finding old-world URLs in all posts and replacing them with decent guess at new URL structure, so that old bits of LS referring to other old bits of LS will not break for future LS.

-Made sure thread IDs are preserved across systems so that the above is worth doing.

09/02/2007
-Finally automated almost all remaining bits of conversion script. Entire thing now pretty much tap-and-drool. WWW:Mechanize is a lot of awesome but it's also really wierd when it doesn't work as you'd expect. Luckily I decided to do this part after I've figured out most of the data conversion process through trial-and-error, so it's nowhere near as necessary for this process to be so nimble these days, thumbs up for ass-backwards.

-Those of you actually paying attention to the plot here may note that I'm avoiding doing work on the actual engine itself; this is due chiefly to fear and bewilderment.

-Accordingly, unless it's going to really rock, I'm going to skip the little shit, like logging link edits, that we've been doing without, and save it for a later phase.


09/10/2007
-I have begun work on the Alpha Queue.

09/12/2007
-The Alpha Queue is working as I want it, roughly, though it needs a lot of final (bad) touches. lol wotak.

09/19/2007
-Still working on Alpha Queue as possible. UI draft is finished for now, working on admin interface so I can adjust vote triggers as necessary. Figuring out the rest of this admin interface shit as I go; it's tangly.

10/22/2007
-Much work on the Alpha Queue in the last month.
-Links modified to work as expected: user/domain blacklists, dupechecking, etc. Also: checking for link subscriptions before deletes, xray hooks, can search on rejected links, UI control.
-Harness stuff: helper scripts, pre-commit hooks, figured out how to maintain a coherent ongoing backup of my custom bits as a discrete plugin.

Next, small...
-link last-post datetimes need to sort the other way.

Next, large...
-Duplicating Alpha featureset, rads system and probably textwars is going to be ugly.
-Beef up X-Ray feature (which will rock).
-Figure out how to use subversion to track an ongoing development that I want to incorporate into my own private changeset.
-Make sure current Journal replacement is still the best candidate.
-Incorporate manual journal data import process into conversion script. -Customize presentation of links/journals/forums.
-Figure out how the fuck I'm going to replicate a front-page system with blocks, etc.
-Figure out replacement for Radpoints system, ugly as shit.
-Integrate Dent's super-sweet fucking theme mockup into an actual theme after fleshing out said theme into all the various little swarmy-place bits.

Also: Despite deep-seated reservations, I can't think of any rational reason not to reveal that I'm building all this atop vBulletin, with some accompanying scripts, which explains why I'm bitching about code I didn't write.

Also also: Am considering finding one of those douchy vBulletin theme ("skin") developers who pays attention to standards and usability and such, and paying him to render Dent's theme as a vB skin, thereby buying back several painful weeks of my future life with cash. If you are such a douche, please contact me, because you may be my private dancer, a dancer for money.