Bboard Updates: PHP Updated

Welcome back! I missed this place. Good host choice, we use them for the podcast ourselves.

Glad this place is running again as I've missed it.

Question, how do I change my user name? I tried re-registering and it won't let me. Sorry I messed it up when I initially registered, and it made my user name my e-mail.

Thank me by posting lots and lots!

Good to see the place back online!

Sorry about that. I've been out of town with little Internet time and/or access most of the last month.

Register and Login appear in the coloured bar -- the third line of text from the top of the page.

I miss Brand_S. And WrongArturo. And rafproductions. I've done my part in bringing the Bboard back! You people bring them back!

The answers are not case sensitive.

Did this really worry you?

Good to see you back!

Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. Earth Prime? Server? I have never heard of this Earth Prime site you describe, nor does the Internet Archive have any record of such a site. Was this a SLIDERS site of some kind? As far as I know, the only SLIDERS resource sites of significance are the Wikia and the Dimension of Continuity.

Only because you pointed it out here - thanks!

Anyone else getting an error on EP.com?

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/2.4.16 (Unix) OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_bwlimited/1.4 mod_fcgid/2.3.9 Server at www.earthprime.com Port 80

To be more specific, the site was "switched off" by my host because it was getting an erratic amount of resource usage. I cannot even access the folder containing all the themes/media to download it.

Once I do, I will transfer the site to the new host and cut the cord on the old one. Scrambling to migrate your entire digital presence from one place to the next is a GOOD way to ring in the new year!

Okay, it looks like it's back up. Feel free to stress test it and let me know if you find anything wrong.

No, it was not intentional to selectively remove issues of the comics, but I don't have time to re-scan and re-compile them for upload. If someone wants to do that, I'll gladly host them and thank them for their time.

Thanks guys. 

Matt, I'll definitely poke around EP.com to see everything looks good as soon as I get a chance.

Comics re-uploaded. I lost my copies too, strangely. Ended up having to search some dark corners to find them.

Bah! Earth214 is over! It's had its time! All the action is over at SLIDERS REBORN now! Earth214 is a dinosaur!

No, I'm just kidding. Earth214 is a charming piece of work, but it was written by a teenager. SLIDERS REBORN is written by an adult who thinks like a teenager. When reading Earth214, I felt that the writing was terrible but the underlying concept, intentions, plots, ideas and overall direction were very well thought out -- it's just that the ability to deliver all that in an engaging, convincing and stirring format wasn't quite there yet. It's like Slider_Quinn21 had the raw talent but needed a few more English classes and maybe some screenwriting software. SQ21 says he's done with 214, but I still maintain that going through and rewriting it -- not the story, but the language and descriptions and dialogue -- would turn it from a charming artifact of youth into something very strong. Earth214 is like a very rough statue that just needs a few more sessions to finish chiseling it into something spectacular.

I don't disagree with any of this, and that's actually been my biggest struggle as a writer.  I feel like I have solid ideas but just an awful translation from brain to paper/screen.  I'm working on my second novel, and I love the story but get bored my some of my own writing.  Which is....bad. 

I have a dozen ideas that I absolutely *love* and want to get out there, and I'm considering putting them in a collection of short stories.  I think a lot of them would do better in a full version in someone else's hands, and if I can do some sort of Phillip K. Dick stories, maybe a handful of talented writers can make the next generation of Blade Runner/High Castle/Minority Report/etc.

Not that I'm anywhere near as good or talented or creative as Phillip K. Dick.  But you know, I can dream.

PS - I just checked my email, Ib.  On it.

Well that all might be true, but at least it wasn't the turd that is Earth 30858 by Slidemania.  It's like the guy thought Peckenpah was an absolute genius at story's and wanted to overboard with the science fictional aspects or what I like to call "Science Fantasy"  Parallel Universes with real Greek gods, two references to Quantum Leap technology, Sliding to previous worlds that they visited in previous episodes of the show all except for home, going overboard with all the sexual, gay, and lesbian content, and every story just got longer and longer and longer to read.  Some other stories long and happily closed he brought back and made the endings more depressing, 10 Sliders at one time which is only ambitious if it's believable and unnecessarily bringing back both Geiger and Rickman, Quinn and Colon's parents live at Epcot Center, THE VORTEX IS PINK, Maggie is Blonde, planet wide epidemics can work at the speed of light with a knife prick, the Sliders start developing "superpowers" and best of all he didn't have the guts to finish his story but we should have seen it coming with all the flashbacks he inserted, not to mention the annoying Mary Sue character he made up known stereotypically as Janine Chen.

However.....I think his Dublian's had some potential if only they would've be harder to kill and more of a threatening backstory about the "Little Green Men"  From outer space.

Though I think now I'm seriously going to check out that SLIDERS REBORN place.

There was one night where I answered questions for literally 30-40 times until I just gave up (since the conversion from Sliders questions to "Hello" and "Earth" questions).  But since that time, it's worked perfectly.  I get questions every couple times, and it's only made me answer one (and on occasion, twice).

Ha, that's funny.  Well done

I've set up a Create Account link in the top menu. It links to a Google Form that allows people to submit their username and email of choice. The form will send me any username requests and I can use that to create new accounts for people instead of asking them to email me personally. This isn't ideal, but the PunBB software hasn't been updated in some time and its extensions for spambot filtering have been falling into disrepair. I'm wondering if it's time to switch to something else, but I'm hesitant to move this Bboard to new software after all the upheaval of the past.

I also disabled the mobile theme as it wasn't working well with new mobile browsers.

Regrettably, the archive of the former Bboard seems to have failed. We still have the files, but it looks like Hosting Check's mismatched database errors -- which crashed the old Bboard in the first place -- reached a state of permanent failure. For this reason, I've removed links to the previous Bboard as there's no point linking to threads that don't load. Thankfully, in 2015, Temporal Flux chose the excellent Dreamhost for our present home that has remained stable and reliable.

I've been testing a responsive theme for the last few months on a separate copy of this forum (that uses the same database for posts and accounts). I've activated it today on the main forum.

My intention has been to make the new theme purely additive. The board should look pretty much the same as always on a maximized desktop browser with the same purple gradients of the Sci-Fi Channel Bboard. However, if you narrow the desktop browser window to half the screen width, the text should now wrap correctly within the narrowed window instead of overflowing past the border.

And when viewing this site on a cell phone, the layout will hide some of the menu functions for the reduced space, increase the font size of the posts for readability, reduce the font size of the user names, and wrap the text to fit within the portrait screen of a phone browser so you don't have to pan right and left to read posts.

The original theme is still saved as a backup in case this new one proves to be a problem, of course.

I've also removed the Request Account link and changed the Register link to lead to the Google Form for registrations. Having both a Request Account and a Register button was apparently confusing people, but it took me some time to find the function that let me alter the Register page appropriately.

the forum!

Another update: I've adjusted the mobile theme at RussianCabbie's suggestion so that the "Last Post" and the link to the most recent addition to each thread is visible on narrow smartphone screens. And in threads, the mobile theme now has a narrower author-byline column and the fonts on mobile are 20 - 25 per cent smaller to fit better on phones.

The desktop/laptop version of the forum is the same except I have made the font 7 per cent larger. The default PunBB theme was built in a world where most computer screens were 1366x768 pixels; now the midpoint is 1920x1080 with higher end screens being 4K. Text is smaller on such high resolutions. A slight increase is helpful.

You may need to clear your cache if you want to see the updated theme right away.

This doesn't affect anything, but in the years before I started having people fill out a Google Form to register, we were getting several spam registrations a day. I recently went through the database and deleted all of those hundreds of ridiculous spam accounts.