Site Planned: Upgrade of forum from 2.2 to 2.3

[The Traveler]

Hi all,

With great joy I can state that since our forum upgrade last week to the latest version of 2.2 was so very successful, we can now upgrade to the latest 2.3 version of XenForo tomorrow!


XENFORO 2.3

This upgrade has the following improvements:

1. Performance enhancements all over with code optimization, no more jQuery and overal smaller JavaScript file sizes
2. Image compression is now done on the browser side instead of server-side, saving quite a few main resources!

These are the new features:

1. SVG's for icons
2. WebP image support
3. Theme variations: including auto detect for dark/light theme, hopefully this will not mess with our beloved current theme
4. Featured content: we already added the thread and topic highlight addon this week, though this is now build into this new version of XenForo itself
5. Embedded content: better 'unfurl' for embedded links
6. Single-Sign-On: This will not be used from the start, though in time this might make for a beter integration between chat and other future parts of our platform
7. Small changed to the editor, welcome messages etc.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN DURING MIGRATION?

Backups will be made of course, for a short time this might slow things down or even make it stutter at times.

During the upgrade the forum will be down!

The Chat, Wiki and old forum will be available during the upgrade, though understandably they can also be affected with slower loading times and some stuttering.


HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

I hope this will all go smoothly and that we will be up and running within an hour after starting together with a few hours of after care, though experience told me to never promise this, so there you go.

If anything serious happens, it will be made public on the WIKI.


WHAT DATE AND TIME AGAIN?

EDIT (new date): Saturday January the 3rd of 2026, depending on other factors I'll keep the starting time much broader than usual, so expect me to start somewhere between 16:00 and 20:00 CET.



Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[blig-blug]

Single-Sign-On: This will not be used from the start, though in time this might make for a beter integration between chat and other future parts of our platform

Great news! I have some ideas that could make use of it, e.g. a PDF library that I would like to make available to Nexus members only. When I looked it seemed that SSO required external plugins. So it's good to know it will be natively supported now by the forum

 

[The Traveler]

Postponed for a few hours due to another high priority responsibility popping up.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[The Traveler]

Looks like the other, work related, high priority will take to at least 04:00 CET this night.

Having gained the wisdom to never perform two different complex tasks at the same time, this means that the planned XenForo update will be postponed till tomorrow, I'll change the event date accordingly.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[The Traveler]

Just finished a few extra preparations for the main part of the update.

However due to the extra work done yesterday, and me wanting to be fresh for that part of the job, the final part will be continued after I had a good night of sleep.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[The Traveler]

Upgrades will start now.

Tasks:

1. FINISHED Backups
2. FINISHED Check of backups
3. FINISHED Final addon check
4. FINISHED Final forum check
5. FINISHED Initiate forum upgrade to 2.3
6. FINISHED Once finalized, check for commit or rollback
   ISSUE RESOLVED Post editor not working correctly, analyzing issue
   1. Rollback
      1. Restore all backups (so forum completely returns to 2.2)
      2. Check result of restore
   2. FINISHED Commit
      1. FINISHED Upgrade certain addons that have separate versions for 2.2 and 2.3 (most are compatible with both)
      2. FINISHED Once finished, triage results of addon upgrade
         1. Partial success, analyse if commit or rollback would be the most prudent path
            1. Rollback
               1. Restore all backups (so forum completely returns to 2.2)
            2. FINISHED Commit
               1. FINISHED Perform after care, like messed up CSS, Integration with PW, etc

Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[The Traveler]

The upgrade to XenForo 2.3 has been completed!

One minor issue was the default icons not loading for the editor, forum type, status, etc, this thankfully has been resolved now.


If anyone of you notice anything off, then please let me know by replying to this topic with the specifics, so we can all help with the final checks.


Overal pretty happy with how smooth this upgrade was.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[blig-blug]

It's a very minor esthetic issue, but right now when the editor is not selected (active), it looks fully greyed out, including the editor bar. I think that didn't happen before, but I may be wrong.

 

[The Traveler]

It's a very minor esthetic issue, but right now when the editor is not selected (active), it looks fully greyed out, including the editor bar. I think that didn't happen before, but I may be wrong.

Ah yes, that is indeed a new 'feature', probably to better fit in, though I think it might lessen engagement.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[Nydex]

though I think it might lessen engagement

Hmmm, I don't think this should be a concern. I can't remember a single instance in which I was prompted to engage in a thread because I saw the reply box. People that register here know they're signing up to a forum, it's not a novel thing to anyone at this point.

 

[blig-blug]

I can't remember a single instance in which I was prompted to engage in a thread because I saw the reply box

It's more that seeing what seems to be a disabled text box may give the wrong idea that it's, in fact, disabled. But I don't think it's a big deal, if it's supposed to be like that. It was more in case it was a problem caused by the migration.

 

[Nydex]

It's more that seeing what seems to be a disabled text box may give the wrong idea that it's, in fact, disabled. But I don't think it's a big deal, if it's supposed to be like that. It was more in case it was a problem caused by the migration.

I get what you mean, but I would rather instinctively look at the Post Reply button and if that was greyed out, then I'd intuitively feel like it was disabled. But the text box shouldn't be an issue, I hope

 

[blig-blug]

Something else I have noticed: text in comments for profile posts can't be selected (without "inspect element", of course). I imagine this is intended, too.
This one is kind of impactful because those comments don't have quoting functionality, other than manually. I know they're not intended for anything important, but it's still nice to be able to easily quote sometimes.

 

[The Traveler]

Something else I have noticed: text in comments for profile posts can't be selected (without "inspect element", of course). I imagine this is intended, too.
This one is kind of impactful because those comments don't have quoting functionality, other than manually. I know they're not intended for anything important, but it's still nice to be able to easily quote sometimes.

Good find!

When analyzing I saw this is actually just a bug in the XenForo/Template CSS, where this is only meant for the footer part of that comment.

I've set the class containing the comment text to be able to select the text again!



Kind regards,

The Traveler

 

[blig-blug]

The updates seem to have broken text headings in many places, I somehow hadn't noticed it until now. Here's an example in Resources, but there are posts with headings broken in the same way: Wiki - The Nexian DMT Handbook

Apparently, the reason is that heading tags aren't e.g.

[H2]

anymore, but

[HEADING=2]

Kind of unbelievable that they would break their markup's backwards compatibility for this, but it seems to be the case that they did.

 

[Nydex]

Uh-oh, that's no bueno...