DOS ain't dead

Here I will post any changes regarding the DOS ain't dead forum. Changes can be technical or organizational. For different topics I will create a sub-thread with a proper subject line. You are free to comment.

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Forum admin

Dunno, how many of you use RSS to follow this forum, but I already noticed years ago new DOS ain't dead feed items show up in my feed reader (Feedbro) one or two hours behind the creation of the posting. The obvious reason are time zones.

my little forum software tells a feed reader it is using GMT (#1) for the pubDate timestamp, where in fact it uses the server's local time (#1) in my setup. Changing 'Forum time difference \ Time difference between server and forum time' (#1, #2) felt 'unnatural' to me and would cause shifting of the time display in web browsers for existing postings. And I would probably have to change this setting twice a year.

So, three days ago I just replaced GMT with %z (PHP: strftime - Manual) and the results in web browser and feed reader look fine to me.

What are your observations?

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Forum admin

> What are your observations?

Nobody?

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Forum admin

Starting from the issue with the Cyrillic letter О I noticed the same for Cyrillic А.

Because I expected trouble with many other international characters, I now used a 'brute-force approach' to convert each database table to the utf8mb4 character set and set utf8mb4_unicode_ci for collation.
For that I had to change each table's engine from MyISAM to InnoDB.
I also set the database connection to use utf8mb4 (utf8 before) and changed the HTML charset from ISO-8859-1 to utf-8.

I wanted to do that already many years ago, but my MySQL knowledge is very limited.
There may be some side effects. If you find any, please report them here.

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Forum admin

The users online counter in the footer no longer includes guest users, 'thanks' to bots, crawlers, and AI scrapers frequently visiting this forum and making this number useless.

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Forum admin

> The users online counter in the footer no longer includes guest users,
> 'thanks' to bots, crawlers, and AI scrapers frequently visiting this forum
> and making this number useless.

For what it's worth, our server also recently was changed
to require a sign-in for the hgweb due to bot activity. More details at https://pushbx.org/ecm/dokuwiki/blog/pushbx/2025/1...ymous_sign_in_now_required_for_the_hgweb_server

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l