This week finishes the last bit of code changes and begins the testing phase for the new authentication system and forums. VATUSA will soon be getting new forum software. Some things to know:
- Posts will be converted, but may or may not be associated with your CID when you login. What does this mean? You may not be able to edit posts you wrote once the conversion happens and they may not be counted in your post count. I will do my best to convert this, but my focus is on making sure we don't lose posts in the conversion.
- Members will be created as they login to the new forum. Your account will use SSO, and when you login for the first time, your account will be created, proper permissions assigned and other information retrieved from CERT via SSO. The way the forum now has users is broken up in such a way that it is highly inefficient to try and convert and there are a number of people who are no longer members that shouldn't be in our user table anymore. Additionally, there are a number of users who aren't part of the division as full members that CERT does not allow us to get information about except by SSO.
- After conversion, you will not be able to send private messages to a user via the forums until after they login.
- The forums will not allow you to change your password. Its integration with SSO requires you to login via VATSIM.
This is the first phase of the new site roll out. Once I schedule the conversion time, I will add a news post to inform users of the forum downtime while the conversion happens. I expect less than an hour downtime while I convert the data to the new forum software, but need to shutdown the forum so data isn't lost.
