RadioRob

Yes! On the home page, look to the LEFT of the "Start New Topic" button. It should be near the "Who's Online" widget. There are three view options: Table, Grid, or Fluid. Choose Table if you want it to look like it did on Xenforo.

Like any good cosmetic procedure, it will take a little bit of time to fully heal and recover from the major surgery. I know it will suck waiting for all of the topics/posts to reindex and rebuild, but I think the outcome should end up pretty nice!

If you don't like the card view that shows pictures of each forum name, you can change this setting! Next to the "Start New Topic" button is three buttons. Click the first one that says "Table". It will switch your view to look like the original Xenforo display!

The Message Forum is now running on Invision Community. All of our posts, topics, and private messages have been moved into the new forum. However you may see some errors and messages about posts missing as the system works to rebuild and reindex the full database. As I mentioned prior to the conversion, it will take approximately 24 hours for the full process to complete. During this time, posts that are not working will magically start coming up. There is no need to file a report. Please feel free to start a new post in the mean time as existing posts work to rebuild. (They will be back soon!)

I can confirm prior to COVID, Lucky’s did have regular nights with nude male dancers in the upstairs bar. The bar is a square in the center of the room with the dancers being on top of the bar. It was similar to Secrets in DC except instead of tipping them in their socks, you tipped them in a leg strap that seemed to be positioned very high on the leg.

Yes. I was a Community Leader. Specifically I was in the Guide program, the Online Gaming Forum, WorldPlay, and AOL Hometown (for building personal web pages). Back in the day... you had to pay by the hour to "go online". Being in various CL programs allowed me to not end up with thousands of dollars in hourly fees for being online.

I increased the limit on the number of stored conversations (Private Messages) that can be stored to 1500. You should be good now.

Just following up on this. Checked the firewall logs and don't see any new blocks/denies that have been logged since I made some changes.

In a few days, I'm going to post a system-wide message with the announcement.

UPDATE 5/13/21: Given the positive feedback from members, I'm going to look at plans to move forward with changing the forum software. My goal is to do this in approximately 2-3 weeks, most likely on a Friday or Saturday evening. (Once I know the specific date, I'll post it.) In order to make the transition, I will need to take the boards offline for approximately 6 hours. Once the initial conversion is complete, I will need to manually set group permissions and start configuring various features. I anticipate this taking another 1-2 hours... at that point, I'll be able to unlock the doors and let everyone back in. Once the forums are re-opened, legacy posts may look funny and some posts may appear to be blank. Given the sheer size of the forums, it will take around 24 hours for all posts to be reindexed and rebuilt. This will naturally straighten itself out as the posts rebuild in the background. (This may also mean the site is a bit slower for the first day since a lot of resources are going to be dedicated to the rebuild/reindex process.) IMPORTANT: Please take a few minutes to wander through the beta site. Feel free to login, post, send a PM, or whatever is most important to you. I want this transition to be as seamless/painless as possible for everyone. By looking around now, you won't have any major surprises as to what to expect later.

My use of the word growth was deliberate and intentional. Yes, my goal is to see this community grow. I've been around various online forums/communities for over 20 years. This included the early AOL days where I served as a Community Leader helping in chat rooms, message boards, online games, etc. Over that time, I've seen the rise and fall of many different communities. At the end of the day, there is not a "single" silver bullet in what will make a community successful. It takes EVERYTHING... from a good site, to good moderators, to good members contributing. You can have the most functional site in the world, with the prettiest graphics/UI, blah blah... but the site could never end up taking off. A forum without active and entertaining members is just another static page on the internet which will end up being forgotten. People come back to a site because of new/fresh content and ideas. As a result, it's ultimately going to be the people that make this place work or not. My goal is to provide tools/features that help the members express themselves and to enjoy their time. When people have fun, they stick around. If they're having fun, guests who happen to come across will see it and want to participate also. That ultimately creates a multiplicative effect making it easier for even more people to join/participate. That will mean thinking through things like the signup process and reducing the barriers to signing up in such a way that can still keep out spammers and people just looking to troll. I've always thought that Cooper did a great job moderating, but at the end of the day he was being overwhelmed. This place is simply too much for just one or two people to handle. Adding more people made perfect sense to help reduce the workload and to provide additional layers of redundancy for when people eventually burn out or need to take a break (short or long term). We'll continue to add additional moderators and super moderators going forward. I personally would also like to add another true admin as well eventually. As I said before, I don't see my involvement with the site in the same way Daddy did. All of the major things I've posted about here ranging from wanting to change the forum software, to the server migration, to rearranging the forum categories, etc were all things discussed among the moderating team first. They are helping shape and refine these issues before they're posted publicly. Once we have a consensus, it's brought out to the masses. Even once it's brought to the public, I've tried to solicit feedback from the members for additional improvements because at the end of the day I think we've gotten a better result with the suggestions ya'll have provided. My goal is to continue this going forward. Regarding the legal question... who knows what will happen in the end. As long as I'm operating in the interest of the community and it's preservation, I cannot be faulted for the actions I take. I'm going to continue doing what I'm doing and let the chips fall where they may. We can survive whether probate lasts for days/weeks/months/years.

By the way… hyperlinks increase your chance for flagging bad rules. Hyperlinks contain items in the background such as slashes, and potentially other symbols. While it’s not against the “server rules”, a firewall will inspect them more closely. Think of a security guard. If a person walks in to a store wearing a hat, it’s not necessarily suspicious. If they walk in wearing a hat, sunglasses, looking around nervously etc they might watch that person more closely. Part of what I’m dialing down is the level of scrutiny around hyperlinks so the firewall is a bit less sensitive about them. (Its racially profiling them just a bit less.)

Remember as you’re typing, Xenforo tries to auto save every minute or so. That is done by your browser triggering a JavaScript running in your browser to capture what’s in the post buffer and submit it to the server in the background to save. The firewall does not know the difference. It just sees a request with a payload in it. So many of the 56 attempts were most likely just the auto saves. You would not have seen those attempts because they’re done in the background. Regarding WHY… ultimately it’s what is known as a false positive. Meaning my settings are so high that they’re TOO sensitive. A firewall attempts to guess what is good and what is bad. Sometimes it guesses wrong and catches a good guy by mistake. That’s what makes it a “false positive”. You’re not doing anything wrong yourself. You’re just posting and interacting with the site. The fix is on me to figure out how to adjust the sensitivity settings so they’re strong enough to stop bad attempts but not so strong as to block legitimate requests as well. In an ideal world, this tuning process would have occurred over a period of a few months. Because of Daddy’s death, we did not have the luxury of time. We had to move fast and put things in place as we went. While this works, it does lead to situations where there can be “collateral damage” as you don’t have multiple days/weeks to measure the impact of what settings are being put in place. As you could see in this case, it was not a situation that was occurring on every request. Instead it only happened in certain situations so it would not have manifested in just a normal check of the site. So just keep doing what you do. If you run into problems let me know. The more details provided, the easier it is for me to get to the root of the problem and fix it. I’ll take care of the technobabble Mr Spock geek stuff.

I looked up your IP address from your post above and plugged it into the firewall protecting the site/server. I'm seeing a bunch of instances where the firewall is flagging the request as malicious. It looks like it's flagged 56 requests for you as suspect in the last 24 hours. An example in the logs: Ray ID 64ef50720bad3631 Method: POST HTTP Version: HTTP/3 Host www.companyofmen.org Path /posts/2122004/edit Query string Empty query string User agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.212 Safari/537.36 Service WAF Rule ID OWASP Block (981176) Rule message Inbound Anomaly Score Exceeded Rule group OWASP Inbound Blocking OWASP Score 85 Action taken Challenge Additional logs [TABLE] [TR] [TD]960024 · Meta-Character Anomaly Detection Alert - Repetative Non-Word Characters[/TD] [TD]OWASP Generic Attacks[/TD] [TD]Log[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]981317 · SQL SELECT Statement Anomaly Detection Alert[/TD] [TD]OWASP SQL Injection Attacks[/TD] [TD]Log[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]959072 · SQL Injection Attack[/TD] [TD]OWASP SQL Injection Attacks[/TD] [TD]Log[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]981257 · Detects MySQL comment-/space-obfuscated injections and backtick termination[/TD] [TD]OWASP SQL Injection Attacks[/TD] [TD]Log[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] What I've done for now is lowered the firewall sensitivity settings to see if that quits catching the false positive. If it still frequently seems to occur, let me know, as I'll have to create a specific rule to disable SQL injection protections for the post edit path (/posts/{id}/edit). See?!? Even the firewall knows how much of a troublemaker you are!

I've named "Clubs" as "Groups" (by editing the language files). Clubs have two views for forums... condensed and expanded. You can see an example in the test I created earlier. (I made this group as I wanted to let members create their own groups for specific areas of interest such as location specific discussion like a city, or a group dedicated to a specific provider, or a topic. https://www.companyofmen.org/beta/groups/1-washington-dc/ If you click on the forums link inside the group, it will take you to: https://www.companyofmen.org/beta/forum/40-forums/ Inside of the forum I created a specific topic with a few replies: https://www.companyofmen.org/beta/topic/124322-test-topic-1/?tab=comments#comment-1817007 As you can see, there is not a way to change how the the replies are displayed. You CAN change how the topic list itself is displayed. You would do that from the topic list page (in this case https://www.companyofmen.org/beta/forum/40-forums/) and clicking one of the two buttons to the left of the "Start New Topic" button. It will toggle how much of a preview you get of the initial topic.

The default view is Linear. I think you’re thinking of the Threaded view which put the replies in somewhat of a nested view based on reply. Most of the major forum software providers moved away from it for a few reasons…. - It was difficult to support in a mobile view. It did not play well with responsive design which lets developers do cross platform UI development. - People never used the correct reply to track the tread properly. - It did not work with multi-quote.If someone was quoting multiple threads, it could not be nested with the reply. Ultimately the major developers just decided to not support it saying it was too much effort to try and make it work properly given how few people actually used it. There might be an unofficial mod to support this, but I’ll have to look to see if there is one compatible with the most recent release of the software.

I drive a BMW, which requires Premium. When I filled up, it cost $3.74.

That will need to be something discussed by the moderator team. I'll pose the question in the moderator forum.

I'll leave this open a few more days. If there are no suggestions, I'll create the copy myself. The folks here tend to have a lot of opinions on stuff related to the site, so before I just did it myself, I wanted to offer the chance to have folks contribute.

I found the problem That was the hint I needed. As I suspected, it was a permission problem. I ran a query for all members (non-banned), and took that result to reset permissions for anyone who might have been effected. I've also noted this for when I convert the site again later when we do the actual conversion so it does not happen again.

It’s most likely a permissions problem. Permissions have to be manually set after conversion. Let me look at that.

By the way... if the majority of folks don't like the stock images I picked, feel free to recommend replacements. I'm by no means tied to selections made. They're just quick "what could go here" type selections. I literally went to the stock image picker and searched for things like "deli", "spa", etc.

The main test board address is: https://www.companyofmen.org/beta/ On that page, you will see a list of all of the forums. The DEFAULT view looks like cards... so as you scroll down on that page, you will see a list of all of the different forums such as the Deli, Spa, etc. A direct link to the Deli for example: https://www.companyofmen.org/beta/forum/8-the-deli/

If you don't like the images, you don't have to see them. You can make it look like the traditional table. Find the "Start a New Topic" button. To it's left should be 3 buttons. Click the first one. It will switch your display back to the traditional forum index view.

You can switch off the card view that displays the images. There is an option to change the display when viewing the site from a desktop. Once you set the option, it will remember it for you.