SBS website update March 2022

What a time. Yeah, it's fine. I still used the old site occasionally, so I ain't seeing an issue switching back here.

Spoiler

I had a wild ride here in this community, faking HTV09 to appear not so lonely and also breaking my promises as there always was stuff coming in my way. I hope I won't be doing such stupid shit again and to actually put up content when I finally got them ready. EDIT: No idea why me 1-2 years earlier was such a moron, but I finally matured

Man, I miss SB, I hope that the community members have not lost all will to use SB.

I’ve been working a bit with SB, but didn’t have much motivation to do so consistently due to the community being quiet. After the site changes are complete, maybe there should be a “revival” competition, where all participants get a badge or something. I’d be happy to donate money for placement prizes as well. Of course, this would depend on the number of people who’d commit to participating.

That sounds like fun! hmmm I'll have to think about it

You know, I miss SBS competitions. Especially because when they were going on, I wasn’t very experienced and was pretty young. I’m still young but I’d like to get more experience through them.

I'd definitely like to see a contest run, I'd participate if at all possible. When I saw the email in spam, I assumed it was because the link to the new website looks sketchy as heck. It looks like nearly random characters and would blend right in with those shortlinks you get in spam texts/emails. Is this site's chat coming back, if this is going to be the active site again?

I'm not sure yet. Our original plan was to link to the discord server (there's a SmileBASIC discord), as discord is a more robust platform than I could ever make, and a larger community. But, if there's a desire for a chatroom, I think something can be arranged. Edit: oh and yeah... lol wow that link does look like spam. Well TBF the website itself probably kinda looks like spam, since it's so mangled right now. I'd be willing to post it later but right now... I just don't want an influx of people complaining about how bad it is lol, there's still so much work to do on it and I kind of just want to let it be quiet for now, since it's not SmileBASIC related anymore

No idea why me 1-2 years earlier was such a moron, but I finally matured

Yeah I feel that one, I'm still retarded but atleast a bit less...

i will say, the new site definitely felt more cumbersome to navigate, but it's kinda sad to just see it go away. Will any of the program pages be accessible anywhere at least?

Yes, sort of. People who created pages on the other website should've gotten an email that explains where the other website is going and what it's used for now (not SmileBASIC), and they can move their content back over to here if they like. So, the pages will be available in some regard... However, that website underwent a rewrite and basically a construction zone right now, so I don't want people flooding it. When it's significantly more stable and like... a real website, then I don't mind people visiting arbitrarily, and yes all the pages that WERE on there are still there.

Email was in my spam folder. Just found it. Glad I kept to that monthly spam-check rule! And thank munkies that the forum is back to being a forum. I enjoyed the idea of the experimental new version, but I think ... in practice.. it wasn't quite as functional as we'd all hoped. Glad this site's back. *distant ascii hugs*

Oh wow, it's been some time since I've talked here. While I'm glad the "old" site is back, I kind of miss some of the things the new site had (as well as the fact that it was a way to leave some of the embarrassing things I've said here behind, heh). I understand the reasoning though. Thanks for everything, randomous! EDIT: One question, now that the new site is down, does this mean notifications will come back?

Notifications on... here, on old sbs? So that's kind of a complicated subject. I'm planning on redoing this website because it's still impossible to maintain, and there's a hard deadline looming in the distance for registration and I just like... can't fix it easily and don't want to waste the time. So while you won't be getting notifications back on THIS iteration of old sbs, the rewrite I'm planning on doing may have them. And no, this isn't some major redoing of the entire website, it'll just be bringing the data and users and all that from here into a similar looking and feeling place but with a different backend. Don't want to make the same mistake twice lol

On a somewhat related note, does that mean chat isn't coming back either?

I changed the registration email service on here, if you happen to be making an account here and it doesn't work, send an email to smilebasicsource@gmail.com. This change should buy us a lot more time so I can actually make a proper replacement for old sbs.

Boo, hiss, discord, etc. Lost data has been a bugbear of mine since Discord took over doing a lot of forum-based things. I know it's "possible", but 95% of the time you need to search and find old data, it's almost impossible to do it via a Discord. For chat purposes, sure, go ahead. But if something's important, it NEEDS to be easy to find with a good search function. It only takes 7,000 re-utterings of "How do I convert a 3DS SmileBASIC project to a Switch SmileBASIC project?" to make you want things to be searchable ;) Gosh, imagine if I only ever posted my weekly SmileBASIC4 games into a Discord server.. How on earth would people be able to find all 141 of my games!?! It'd be a nightmare!!!

We're not going to move the entire website to discord, just the chat. You can still post programs and talk on the forums here, but we figured that because chat is something that requires additional technology that discord does better, we could have our chat just be discord.

I do want to mention (for people who are still here) that we will eventually have a new so-called "frontend" for this website. It will still use the same data and have the same features and layout, unlike the last rewrite, so no worries there. However, I want everyone to be aware that when this rewrite is pushed, we will temporarily lose some features. I will add them back as time moves on, but I need to get us off this server and software, because it is incredibly outdated. To start with, some of the things we may lose (temporarily) are: - Polls - Private messages - User settings - Previews - Popularity calculations (frontpage will thus be a bit more random) - Badges (the data won't disappear, don't worry) - The OSP section I'm doing it this way so we can achieve basic functionality (forums, activity, programs/pages) to start with so we can get off that server, and then I can start adding things as people want them rather than in some arbitrary order. I don't want to add things nobody cares about. This is still very far in the future most likely, and we'll be going back to the good old https://smilebasicsource.com url rather than having a redirect. Old urls will redirect to the appropriate location, don't worry. This ISN'T another move, for real. It's more like a refresh, so I can actually support SB for switch and maybe even add a chat, since everyone keeps asking for it lol

Would an auto-refreshing Shoutbox not serve the purpose? .. if nothing else, it'd be easier to implement. Well, depending on how complicated you want it, anyway.. Good luck with the reworking.

The auto-refreshing shoutbox doesn't solve the server issue. When you run ubuntu, your options are to deal with what's in the packages, or build it yourself, which almost always fails on a system like ubuntu because of a half-package half-sourcecode mess. The latest ubuntu LTS is 20.04, and it doesn't have the old stuff we need to run this website, and I don't blame it. Before you go on telling me exactly how to solve this problem, know that it is a problem I do not want to solve. I would rather go a different route, which is the one I stated.