After the 2011 migration to the Drupal infrastructure, the WSGF website has been largely unchanged. It ran on Drupal 6, which reached its end of life in 2016. Though upgrading to Drupal 7 was possible, there was no drop-in upgrade path to Drupal 8 or newer. At least some of the modules we used were not available for the newer versions either, so the WSGF founder, Skip, created a spreadsheet listing our installed modules and the possible replacements. The idea of migrating was up in the air, but then nothing happened for years, as the old team including Skip were busy with their day jobs and family lives. Makes sense for a website founded in 2003, right?
Though I had been a WSGF admin for years, my access was limited to the content side of the website. I used that to make various changes, but my hands were tied as far as going any further, so I resorted to creating a Trello board to document every pressing and less critical issue that needed addressing. Everything changed in December last year, when Skip shared the server login and other credentials with the rest of the staff. Almost immediately, I made improvements I had planned and soon began the work on upgrading to the latest version of the Drupal 6 branch to patch the security vulnerabilities.
After some brainstorming involving Skip and our moderator Skid, I was prepared to take the next step: upgrading to the most recent version of Drupal, 11, released earlier in 2024. Skid had a separate server and offered that it be used for any testing before we made any changes on the main server. Skid's server was like a playground, allowing to experiment and get a feel for things without worrying about breaking anything.
The months that followed took a tremendous amount of unpaid full-stack work just out of passion and gratitude to Skip and the rest of the community. I had to deal not only with the Drupal system itself, but also with the SQL database, PHP scripts, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, grading rules using a special flowchart system, Twig, YML configs, Cloudflare and Nginx (with the help of our old-school admin CJM who also upgraded the OS in preparation), among other things. The migration configs automatically generated by Drupal were useful, but still required a lot of learning and extra work to tailor them to our website. There was a lot of back and forth to ensure that each of the thousands of our content nodes and users is properly and fully imported and looks right. As a result, all content starting from 2006 should be in place at the original URLs from the 2012 migration. It seems that few websites are as resistant to link rot, but we've always been ahead of the curve. After all, the forum was founded when 4:3 was the norm, but the WSGF community challenged that before the wide adoption of 16:9.
Apart from the obvious change to the look of the website aimed at recreating the old feel while respecting the modern standards of the web and improving accessibility, one less than obvious change is that there is a proper mobile version of our website now. Across the web and on our end, a significant percentage of visitors use phones or tablets, so having the website be readable on mobile is important. As per the practices of responsive design, I had to create many conditional style rules just to make sure everything scales properly on the narrowest and very wide screens. That is what we are known for. If we expect game developers to account for all kinds of display configurations, we should be an example of that.
Building the website from the ground up came with a number of other benefits as well. Our sessions are now stored persistently as expected, not logging people out every few hours. The database is a lot smaller, so it should be more efficient. There are other changes that come to mind. The user profiles work now, publicly displaying the users' system specs and Steam IDs. The FOV Calculator has been manually reworked for the new infrastructure and made a little more modern and relevant. The grade medals get displayed immediately after saving a report. The system overall should be more secure not only from the patches but also from improvements to authentication. I'm sure there are many other things here and there, but it's hard to recollect after so much work.
It may be worth noting that the ads placed on the old site have been dysfunctional for a while, and the new site currently has no ads at all. Running the server costs Skip around $150 monthly, so please consider joining the WSGF Patreon run by Skip. We have no monetization scheme or active partnerships, so everything is paid out of his pocket to zero personal benefit. We may not even need ads if the costs get covered by the users.
For the next months, I'm going to focus on ensuring the website runs and works as intended as we allow people to register and contribute, which includes allowing any registered user to create and possibly edit any reports or write blogs, all for the first time in years. The subsequent tentative plans include a native dark mode, better coverage of 32:9 displays in our Detailed Reports, and more.
