RPLS Today 2018

Wendell · 2017-11-28T04:53:00Z

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...

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Wendell

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?ÿ https://surveyorconnect.com/community/official-announcements/important-upcoming-updates-enhancements/paged/4/#post-457417

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Posted : November 29, 2017 11:41 pm

stlsurveyor

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I liked how you could see where members are registered, or where they lived. I always considered that when reviewing posts, suggestions, etc.?ÿ

Will that be coming back?

MO-AR-KY

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Posted : December 2, 2017 6:58 am

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