RPLS Today 2018

Hey all,

Welcome to the new RPLS Today. I realize that this announcement might not excite many of you and it may even irritate some as well. But I assure you, I have my reasons and they are good reasons. I invite you to read on for more information.

But first, an apology.

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused everyone. If I could go back a couple of years and skip over the last "upgrade", I certainly would. I realize now that my choice of software was a bad one. Our business structure was different at that time as well and I had other influences that fed into that decision. But now that things are different overall (hooray, no more partners!) and RPLS Today is functioning with a clean slate under Harness Media LLC (my web development company), I've had a year or two to really look at everything. I've wanted to ditch xenForo (the previous software) for quite some time now, as it turned out to be a huge letdown.

That all said, I take responsibility for the failures we've experienced and the bad choices we've (I've) made. Moving to this new system helps me to "officially" start that new chapter and do it the way I wanted to do it in the first place. So... I am truly sorry for all the twists and turns we've taken over the years. It certainly was not intended as punishment to you, but I can assure you that my choices have served their own kind of punishment to me. And I deserve it.

I know some people are frustrated and a few have expressed that here. I've received a couple of emails basically telling me to go pound sand, because this has happened one too many times. I understand. No, really, I understand. I hope that those folks will stick with us and see it through, but I also understand their frustration. I hope to make the site so much better than before that they'll want to come back to find out what's going on over here.

Ok, so why another change?

I'm pretty well-versed in WordPress, which is a popular software that is used to build and manage websites. I use it exclusively to build all client websites via Harness Media, and it has proven over the years to be robust, powerful, expandable, and well-supported. The new website is built purely in WordPress.

The previous iteration of RPLS Today was a combination of WordPress on the frontend and xenForo for the community forums. Bringing the two together was a bit of a feat all by itself. We chose xenForo a few years ago because it was the most popular and best-rated forum software available at the time. As a standalone, it's pretty decent, but management and design aspects of xenForo are pretty clunky and hard to work with. For example, when the WordPress side of the website needed an update, it was a quick, automated step that took about 30 seconds; when xenForo needed an update, it was a ridiculous process of removing the old files, uploading new files, running a script, then running another script to check the first script. But that is just one small example of the terrible management aspects of xenForo.

xenForo did have a lot of features, there's no doubting that. But just like there are complaints about this new WordPress system, there were many more complaints about xenForo. The problem there was that making modifications or changes to those features were a pain in the ass. I'm not saying that WordPress features wouldn't take some work too, but at least I'm working in my wheelhouse here. And there's a lot more support to be had when it goes outside my capabilities.

Also, I'm not much of an "out-of-the-box" kind of guy. I'm not able to settle for default styles and features -- I need to customize. Using something like xenForo, phpBB, or the like is out of character for me. WordPress gives me so much more in that regard.

Future expandability and upgrades with WordPress will be much easier and we won't have to keep messing with the userbase. WordPress provides a very nice user system by default. The future is much brighter now for all of us.

Great. Why did we have to reset passwords?

We migrated all users from xenForo to WordPress. Since passwords are stored with one-way encryption in both systems, there's no real way to extract the passwords from the old system and import them into the new system. Even if we could do that, it would introduce a huge security risk.

So the best way to do this was to require a password reset for everyone. This is annoying, yes, but it is also a security measure. Some websites even expire passwords and make you set new ones every couple of years or so. And then there's the websites who have had security breaches -- they automatically reset all user passwords to close the breach. So consider this a measure to increase the security of RPLS Today for all of us.

Some features are missing!

Yes, I know. We're working on that. We hope to have an unread posts option in the near future. Sadly, though, I cannot promise a date until we get a bit closer. There will be some other features on the roadmap as well, some of which are already ready, but I didn't want to bombard you with new stuff.

This forum is actually a bit more basic.

Amazing as it may seem, this new forum is actually far simpler than the previous xenForo forum. It may not seem simpler to you, but that's just because it's still new to you. There's also not a bunch of crazy crap going on in the background like the xenForo forum had. It's very refreshing to me, and I think you'll like it too once it sets in a little more.

Having trouble with anything?

It is entirely possible that some problems you are experiencing have to do with browser caches. Your browser recognizes the website URL and may have stored some old crap from the old forum that is causing problems for you now. I would recommend that you try refreshing your cache.?ÿ http://www.refreshyourcache.com/en/home/

If you are still having problems, you may be using an older operating system (Windows XP anyone?) or an older version of a web browser. Either or both of these situations will likely cause some issues.

Regardless of those situations, if you are having trouble, please post in the Support forum. Please try to keep one question per post so that I can keep track of the various issues and respond accordingly. Piling a bunch of issues into a single random thread makes it very hard for me to keep track of what's going on. If you are unable to post in the forum at all, please use our Contact page to submit your issues to me.

Hang in there.

I know it's tough. Trust me, I'm the one who keeps making these upgrades! LOL 😀 I really do appreciate your continued patronage and I hope you'll hang around to see what's coming up in RPLS Today's future. It's a bright one.

Your friendly neighborhood admin,
Wendell