Little bit of an update on LES - day 2 - 12th June 2026

AnthonySmith

Just a bit of an update, as today was the first day of actual real work on LES, I could do, I might do these daily for a while or when needed.

1. I did some pretty big rule changes, the biggest one being that the community now decides who gets a provider tag, there is no more support desk (just use a PM or email), and all the price limits are gone for now while the world has gone a bit mad.
2. Added more offer categories and industry news categories.
3. @mikho and @Mason are regular users again (That might change; it was a good suggestion to have one or more of the old admins hold the dead man keys to keep the place going if anything happens to me as they already know the backend)
4. I spent some time getting familiar with the backend again, and the changes, 1 server has been made surplus to requirements already, just waiting for project rights at Hetzner, so I can move some out.
5. I cloned LES and made a new dev environment and worked on 3 improvements:
   5.1 - Ignore user plugin, figured I would start with something simple, it does not work yet but it's almost there, this will allow you to ignore all posts and discussions by any users you dont want to see or interact with.
   5.2 - Google AdSense account created and simple adverts will be displayed to not logged in users you will have the option to opt-in, but it is not the default and not expected, Hopefully this alone covers all costs.
   5.3 - looked at adding a storage volume to the Hetzner VPS and using that for images, so users can upload images again, they will be processed, compressed and have meta/exif data stripped out so we can get rid of the bloody imgur links etc going forward.

The quick and easy changes I can do first (I have help), I will get done, so the place immediately starts standing on its own 2 feet financially and have some spare hopefully for fun projects and to pay for community stuff!

Then there might be a period of not seeing a great deal as Vanilla is converted to php 8.4 and MariaDB 11.x

You might see a few little strange page loads over the next few weeks. Please try refreshing and hard refreshing a few times before reporting anything, if you spot anything that lingers, email me at admin@ this forum's domain dot com

About 16 hours of work went into this today, probably the same tomorrow, just to smash out the quick wins, then once we get to stable supported versions, we might have a few hours downtime while everything is moved off runcloud + ubuntu and onto Debian and then the rest of the discussed changes will start to roll out pretty regularly after that.

After all that, we need a new theme. I vote for a Windows Aero theme and a vBulletin theme and a Windows 3.1 theme... but then again, I am old.

mwt

Technical improvements are exciting. I think flexible provider tags is a good idea.

Though, I don't want a Windows Aero theme.

WSS

If I spent as much time on a dead platform, I'd still be broke, too.

mikho

@WSS said:
If I spent as much time on a dead platform, I'd still be broke, too.

Well.... you are 🤷🏻

Ympker

What's this I'm seeing suddenly? 🤔

Jk Good luck with everything Anth!

msatt

@AnthonySmith said: so we can get rid of the bloody imgur links etc going forward.

+1 and UK users can see them.

AnthonySmith

@Ympker said:
What's this I'm seeing suddenly? 🤔

Jk Good luck with everything Anth!

Haha 😂 for half a second.... You got me

somik

Why dont you also have a place to report bugs and issues with the forum before you start modifying things? That way you dont have to hunt all over the forums for user reports.

@AnthonySmith said:
After all that, we need a new theme. I vote for a Windows Aero theme and a vBulletin theme and a Windows 3.1 theme... but thæn again, I am old.

XP blue theme please. I skipped over windows vista and most of windows 7 so no Aero nostalgia

AnthonySmith

@somik said:
Why dont you also have a place to report bugs and issues with the forum before you start modifying things? That way you dont have to hunt all over the forums for user reports.

@AnthonySmith said:
After all that, we need a new theme. I vote for a Windows Aero theme and a vBulletin theme and a Windows 3.1 theme... but thæn again, I am old.

XP blue theme please. I skipped over windows vista and most of windows 7 so no Aero nostalgia

PM or email is fine for anything I don't see myself.

Right now staging is essentially 1:1 with live, I am just going to start a new thread after all significant changes if anyone spots anything they can put it there.

I had a thread open to discuss changes for about 6 weeks so that's what was used to inform the direction of travel.

AnthonySmith

Finished for today, another long day.

LES-specific Google AdSense plugin installed.

NOT actually working yet AdSense account approval pending, fallback plan is TinyAdz

This shows adverts to non-logged-in users; it is Opt-out as standard for logged-in users.

If you want to give some support (no judgement for those that don't, adverts are ANNOYING!!) This is how you do it:

You get a little supporter tag if you do:

php 8.4.22 and mariadb 11.8.8 uplift

This work has been completed in dev/staging it was actually far less work than expected, and the MariaDB change only needed 3 small tweaks in total

Small issue with the polls, which is still being worked on

So we expected this to take about 2 weeks but that was based on nothing except fear, haha. I really don't know why Vanilla doesn't just push an update out. I feel like they are shooting themselves in the foot for the amount of work it does not require.

Anyway, polls to fix and a bit of user from hell testing and then I guess we just start building all the new features in dev, the schema actually needs almost zero modification, it's pretty well considered really for a heavy plugin ecosystem so we will hopefully get to LES v2 pretty soon.

I will still be moving it to a new server, I guess so I have a quick backout plan if anything goes wrong, but I am feeling more optimistic.

imok

Read the notifs.

cservers

I feel the vast majority of the new rules are very balanced and very well laid out and essentially I agree with nearly all of them. Looked at the topic originally but things went so good that I didn't really feel the need to give an input as, by page 2, it was all pretty much seen.

However, I feel the new rule/bit where a new provider requests for a Provider Tag being left for the community to vote, and then the Provider gets or not the tag based on at least a "reasonably positive approach", can give some unnecessary headaches in some cases for new providers attempting to enter LES. Which is counterproductive for what is intended here (to have better offers).

Many times, who requests that is either a new company or someone that doesn't have that much history or isn't that known yet to begin with; it's difficult for any community, of any size, to decide adequately based on the existing information. Then, there's also the risk for the providers because if, for some reason, LES grows to the point a relevant flock of users behaves like OGF, it effectively can stop admissions altogether; and of course, the obvious of the human nature, which much more rapidly points a negative than states a positive about anything and everything, and this will affect a provider that has a mixed service due to technical or specific reasons, due to being new, or simply because it addresses different portions of the market which are more vocal or demanding (or have specific expectations) than others.

All of these may potentially have an effect with the rule as it stands, today.

I believe this should probably a two-tiered (but light) process for accepting... Neither a community should have so much burden on deciding whether a provider gets to be on LES - which can even create all sorts of distortions and a medium/long-term balance loss on the community itself - neither a given mod/admin should release themselves from the acceptance part of things. There's a level of due dilligence a community can't do, but a given forum/mod can request much more for any applying provider quite safely, and I believe both, not only one of the parties, should be involved in it. After all, it's a nice space for both as well...

My two pence.

Tiago

AnthonySmith

You will probably end up being right @cservers and I am happy to adapt if needed.

I am trying to take the lightest touch approach first and then tighten up after, I think a lot of the feeling that we need to cover every possible problem in advance with 2 safety nets on top comes from LET scam trauma. It is my first instinct to be over the top on these things I have to force myself to relax haha 😂

We will try light touch common sense then add extra control when it's proven to be needed.

9 times out of 10 it's a community member that tells us about a problem with a host anyway we did not pick up during checks.

Time will tell.