Anyf.ca / anythingforums.com Coming soon...
Anyf.ca is a rebranding of anythingforums.com which is a forum that has been around since the early 2000's. Iceteks.com, which was also around since the early 2000's will be combined, along with newer forums uovalor.com and uogateway.com. This is in an effort to hopefully provide a central community for all 4 forums and a place to hang out on a more old fashioned platform style and speak freely.
I know it's been years... over a decade in fact that I promised this but it seems every time I get close to launch something comes up and I just get side tracked. That, and my procrastination does not help...
But it will return. I will not promise any date because we all know how that usually goes.
Stay tuned and keep checking!
-Red
Status Update
[Jan 4 2023]
A new year! Still not a new forum. Yeah I know I'm a slacker. It's my new year's resolution to get this done in the new year. Seriously! I just need to get it done. I started working on it again and doing more progress. I am being more careful about modifying core code so that future updates are easier, so it's taking a bit longer doing the changes I want to make but things are moving.
[Oct 1 2022]
I got carried away with some back end enhancements to the authentication system, but those are mostly done now. I will be starting to prep integration into the forum in the next few weeks hopefully, as time permits. I had originally done this but because this is a newer up to date platform I need to redo it. Overall things are going well, just slow. I don't get to work on this as often as I would hope.
[July 3 2022]
More progress being done on migration script. There is continuous testing and checking to make sure various combinations of posts, bb code etc are converting properly and it is a somewhat manual process to just go through lot of random posts and take note of any oddball conversions, but things are looking good. In fact I have even managed to fixed broken links to smilies and attachements that were not converted properly from previous forum conversions in the early 2000's. Avatars and signatures are also going to be transferred over fairly decently. Any formatting that is too involved to parse properly is just being replaced with something catch all. Good enough for Canada. Once I am satisfied with how everything is transferring over I will start setting up permissions, find/make a nice template, and then finally start on the auth system. At that point it will just be the thing of doing lot of extensive testing of many aspects of the site and then releasing it.
I don't want to make any promises but I hope to launch by fall.
[June 14 2022]
I am very close to completing the migration script and post parsing done for all 4 forums. I am in the testing phases of checking many random posts to look for any anomalies that may need to be corrected. I have also successfully transferred avatars and sigs to some extent. This is not perfect by any means but my goal is to have it good enough. Things like sigs are easily going to be changed by users over time anyway.
Once I am happy with the conversion process I will start to work on the auth system and integration. There's a possibility I skip this part altogether but I really do like the idea of having a separate auth system as it gives better experience if I launch any other services in the future.
At that point it will be time to start looking for or coding a site template. I may actually do that part post launch.
After over 10 years I am very excited to relaunch and it is incredible going through the older threads, some of which are 20 years old, and knowing that this will be live again. Lots of nostalgia and good times.
