Chile Forum

I'll just rename him in the new forum. We will adopt him as the "allchileblob".

No one panic. I am taking the chilewiki offline for upgrades.

ok, the chile wiki has been upgraded and converted to go with the new conversion. We are making progress and it should not be too much longer before we can make the full switch. Right now I am installing some bells and whistles as the basic system seems to be working fine. Please keep testing.

I am now moving to the more experimental stuff like adding a live chat function, and some other administrative things to make my life easier keeping up with everyone.

ok, the chile wiki has been upgraded and converted to go with the new forum upgrades. We are making progress and it should not be too much longer before we can make the full switch. Right now I am installing some bells and whistles as the basic system seems to be working fine. Please keep testing.

I am now moving to the more experimental stuff like adding a live chat function, and some other administrative things to make my life easier keeping up with everyone. They will need a bit of testing still.

Just an update on the progress here.

The Chile Wiki and Chile photo galleries have been upgraded. new members in the last week or so will not be able to logon to the wiki or photo gallery until the full conversion is completed to the new forum. Sorry for the inconvenience. Old members should still be able to log in and add photos and edit the wiki.

The conversion should not be long now that those big steps in the conversion are done. I have a few other things to add still and test, but the major work is done. I might even be ready sometime today to give the switch a go.

I still encourage members to keep testing, especially making sure they can login to the new forum.

We now have live chile chat for the new forum installed. I really need people to test this one so I can see what kind of server load averages it is creating.

It is on the front page of the test forum down at the bottom of the page you should see a window.

In order to see it you must be logged in, and have javascript turned on for the forum. Most people should have that turned on all ready, or this forum likly does not work very well.

We are getting closer kids.

pop over to the http://www.allchile.net/chileforum2 and look at the bottom of the front page and give it a test.

Your user name from this forum should work over there. It is just real time update. So, say every few seconds it checks to see if anyone has posted, and then pushes it out to your browser. It basically looks and works the same as the forum, just it updates immediately.

No VOIP skype type calling (yet). I might do that at some point in the future.

My big concern with real time communication is that the information tends to get lost. It basically does not get shared. This live chat is a nice middle ground, as the history will stay available for other members and perhaps google will index it. Kind of the core goal of this forum is to share information about Chile, and if it does not get captured in a way that can be indexed by google, then that info is gone for ever. So, for example a real time voice calls would be fairly useless to say a new member. We want to share our collective knowledge.

So, on the new chile forum I have added:

---Live Chile Chat You can find at the bottom of the front page

--- I have added a global administrator announcement. One feature missing from our current forum is a way for me to really reach everyone in a way that will not be missed.

--- I have added a recent posts at the top of the home page that will grab, well the recent posts and put them front and center so everyone can keep track. You will also have a whole bunch of features allowing you to search, bookmark, and organize the thread you are following.

I am adding some security and administrative stuff currently, but I might do the switch as early as tonight if I don't stumble across any big problems.

That's the plan. I will likly take both forums offline, and do final database dump from the old forum to the new forum.

I will do a little bit of reorganizing things, such as dropping a few of the forums that don't get a lot of action and move those topics and posts in to other forums. Overall, 99.9% of everything will move in to the new forum.