New Site on its way!

The first phase of the NS recode is almost done, and we're getting the site ready for the switch to the new server. The site will be down beginning sometime on Friday afternoon/evening until Saturday afteroon when the new site will be live.

We've separated the changes into two different steps. The first will involve the move over to the new server, a widening of the site, and an update to the colours and general design of the site (don't worry we didn't do anything drastic).

Part two of the recode will launch October 15th. We'll be changing the home page (in the interim it will remain mostly a news listing) and adding a bunch of new content sections, launching the Park Updates for the season, and lots of other goodies.

Paul (nopoles) has written up a more detailed list of the changes you can expect to see:

Forums:

- Better quoting features. You can now select which part of a post you wish to quote. Signatures will no longer be included in quotes either.
- Quoted images will be displayed in the quote.
- My Threads has been fixed so if a thread is moved to a different category, you will still be able to load it through My Threads.
- There will be no more spaces added to long strings of characters. (They annoyed me too).

No more broken 'remember login': Lets face it, Remember Login never actually worked. It was purely there for show. We always meant to fix it but we've thought of something better! Members will log into the site as normal. However instead of being logged off after 30 minutes of inactivity, you will simply be set as 'offline', but stay logged into the site. Your next page load will return your 'online' status, and will not require you to login. Not only is this a bazillion times more convenient, you will no longer loose posts to page refreshing or automatic logouts!

Procedure: The site move will take a few steps. The web server will have to be disabled to as not to allow changes to be made to the database while I copy data to the new server. NS hosts 36Gig of media including member photos, videos & icons. Additionally Newschooler's database is 1.5 Gig in just text!

Once everything is residing on the new server, all the data will have to be converted & imported into the new systems. In addition to a facelift, all of NS has been re-built from scratch including authentications, database layouts and file locations. This means I'll have to organise all the data and place them in the correct places. Since database changes have been made, I've got dozens of scripts to run to convert data from the old site to work on the new. I'm expecting everything to go smoothly, but it will take some time.

Missing sections: The migration from the old site & server to the new rig will take up to 24 hours. Assuming everything goes well most the site will be functional by Saturday evening. However all of NS will not be available immediately after the move. It will take me another week or so to finish importing the following site areas (in about this order):

- Videos
- Pictures
- Cults
- Search
- Member Articles
- Member Reviews
- Links
- Tricks

NS's forums, messaging & profiles will all be active, as well as the news. Although the Cults page will not exist, you will still be able to chat in your cult forums. I will work to enable each section as quickly as possible.

We hope you're stoked on the new look and we'll do our best to get everything back online quickly.
- NS Staff