ZA Furries

For the past 11 years, the forum has been hosted by Anoyomouse on servers located in Switzerland. For various reasons, we will now be moving the forum to South African servers hosted by Yukon. The move is scheduled for this Sunday (19.05.2019) and the forum will be locked/unavailable during the process. Hopefully everything will proceed smoothly and the forum will be available in the late afternoon.

Once the forum is properly set up on the new server, I also want to upgrade the forum software and install a number of extensions which should fix some of the current forum issues (particularly the white pixels around smileys) and add some fun, new features.

Well I'll be damned.

Awesome, this sounds like great changes all around. ^.^

Just a quick update. The main part of the server migration has been completed successfully. The forum that you are seeing right now is coming from the new servers in South Africa.

However, the transfer took a lot longer than expected and there are still many more details and changes that need to be finalised. We have also not had any opportunity to upgrade the forum software and install new extensions. Ivic and I will be prioritising the remaining changes over the next week and sorting out what needs to happen and when we can get it done. Hopefully next weekend we will be able to get the next batch of changes made. On the positive side, there should not be any long downtimes.

Because we have moved a lot of things around, please tell us if anything is not functioning the way it is supposed to or if you notice any changes from before.

That is awesome!
I'm glad that the first step has been successful. Thank you both for all of your time and hard work in pushing these improvements.

We owe huge thank you to Valerion for helping us with parts of the migration. A big reason for it is that the old server also contained business information unrelated to ZAFur, so only Valerion had server access. When he left we had to make new plans for hosting and we needed his help to get all the old files. He also helped us troubleshoot a bunch of teething problems on the new server.

Awesome job guys, looks like everything is working. This was way overdue.

So, question. Does this mean an amendment of the Legality section of the Forum Rules to be only pertinent to SA? I can think of a couple of topics this would affect, such as cannabis and singular guinea pig ownership.

I'm not sure there were particularly many things that we couldn't discuss purely due to Swiss laws but yes, we will change that. I think we can give it a little time. While the forum itself has been moved and is now running off the SA servers, the home page and some of the other support features are still running off the old host.

Apologies for the delay but everything should now have been transferred completely. We know longer use the old servers and hosts for anything. As usual, just keep an eye out for any issues but nothing should be a problem at this stage.

The next big step which would be noticeable on the user side is the upgrade of the forum software and installation of extensions after the process has been tested. In addition, the rules will be updated shortly to reflect the change in hosting.

I am pleased to announce that the forum software has been brought up to date. In addition, several new extensions have been installed.

Smileys and topic icons have been improved and no longer have those ugly white pixels around them. ( )
That change is not retroactive for topic icons unfortunately and I did not want to modify the files that were already there. However all subsequent topic icons are better quality.

If you go into the full reply mode there is a new, advanced BBCode box. This massively expands how you can customise your text and the number of sites we can embed video from. I encourage everyone to take a look.
Some features are just for fun.
If there is anything that does not work or is missing, send me a message.

At the top of the page we now display the phases of the moon. I think this will be very helpful for the werewolves on the forum. Okay, it's really just for fun. By default it shows the moon from the Northern hemisphere but you can flip that in your user control panel.
User Control Panel > Board Preferences > Moon Orientation

Lastly, there is a top poster of the month extension which will show who has been contributing the most posts to the forum in the current month.

If anything does not work or if you do not like it, don't hesitate to send me a message or post here. We are testing these extensions and want to see if you like them and think they are worth keeping.

Leeward wrote: ↑Wed May 22, 2019 4:55 pm So, question. Does this mean an amendment of the Legality section of the Forum Rules to be only pertinent to SA? I can think of a couple of topics this would affect, such as cannabis and singular guinea pig ownership.

The rules have now been changed.

Nice.

I noticed a couple of things.

The top posters ever leaderboard has a discrepancy in post count with the user profile, I assume due to hidden or deleted posts; mine has 12 posts fewer than my profile says.

Also the rules state "you must ask an administrator (Ideally, Rakuen Growlithe or Ivic_Wulfe)" which is redundant because those are now the only two administrators.

Leeward wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2019 4:54 pmNice.

Thank you.

Leeward wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2019 4:54 pmThe top posters ever leaderboard has a discrepancy in post count with the user profile, I assume due to hidden or deleted posts; mine has 12 posts fewer than my profile says.

I reset the forum post counts which now lowered a number of counts but they are still not fully matching up. Part of it is because, other than the top poster of the month, the overall poster list is only until the start of the month. So no June posts are counted. Even after resetting the post counts and taking when it is counting there is a slight difference in the count. I'm not sure why that is. But it shouldn't be too important right now.

Leeward wrote: ↑Sun Jun 16, 2019 4:54 pmAlso the rules state "you must ask an administrator (Ideally, Rakuen Growlithe or Ivic_Wulfe)" which is redundant because those are now the only two administrators.

That is true. I have changed the wording now.

*now suffers from posting anxiety* >_<

Wow, the forum is looking a lot better. I really like all of the changes that have been made. Thank you so much for all of your hard work!

A small adjustment to the Top Poster extension. Since I end up replying to a lot of things and making a lot of notices, I usually have a really high post count. So I've now tried to change the settings to exclude admins and mods from the Top Poster count. Hopefully that change should be visible within the next ~30 minutes when the extension refreshes.

That doesn't seem fair, but thanks I guess?