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Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 1:41 am
by Moto
We have been running on an outdated forum software, and I finally took the time to get us back up to date. There was quite a bit of fiddling involved because we had a heavily modified forum before. The site was on a platform that came out around 2009 with fairly minimal updates to the core. Normally, I would have waited to move forward with such a massive update, but it really couldn't be accomplished without shutting the forum down for awhile. I figured we were better off to push forward and work the bugs out as we go.

Technicality this update gets us ready for mobilegeddon which starts tomorrow. Google is releasing an algorithm update that will punish sites that are not mobile friendly. We were technically mobile friendly before, but there where a lot of hoops I jumped thought to make it that way. The site is now natively mobile friendly.

I do plan to try to get a legacy looking theme up sometime in the future, but for now we are probably stuck with this. I was up until about 6am just getting this one working. I've spent a good part of the day squishing bugs, but there are quite a few more things I will need to go to get us back to 100%

I could try to list all of the updates, but there are too many and I don't really think anyone will care. Hopefully this platform will be good to go for another 4-6 years.

What is working? What isn't?

Other notes:
* You can now login with social media sites, but if you do make sure your kizashi club account is using the same e-mail as your social site or it will make you a new account. I know there is a way around this, but I need to look into it. I have a feeling there will be some growing pains associated with the plugin, but I have a feeling it will work to our favor in the long run.
- If you test it out and it screws something up let me know. I think I can merge the accounts (no guarantee yet).

* Our good security plugin from the old version of the forum has not been released for this version yet so we may have a few extra spammer get though. The extension is in development I expect it will be out sometime this summer.

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 10:38 am
by Woodie
I voted hate it, but that may be because I'm a grumpy old codger. I hate anything that changes, think about dumping my girlfriend if I happen to glance at her in the middle of a long eye blink.

I usually end up calming down and learning to like things.

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 1:03 pm
by Moto
That's alright. I'm not sure i'm a fan yet. There aren't very many good theme options, but more will become available as time goes on.

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 1:40 pm
by fjroman2
It'll take some getting used to...but it seems ok. One thing I am missing is the button for "my posts".

Can you point me to where that went?

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 2:02 pm
by Moto
it is under the quick links drop down on the top left side. "Your posts"

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 3:27 pm
by fjroman2
Got it!! Thanks!

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 7:03 pm
by Sluggo
Don't like and here is why. The way it was before I could look at the page and see all the different forums and when and who did the last post in that forum. In one glance at the page I could see what was new.
Now I see forum boxes for Chat, Performance, DIY, ect but the boxes only show Topic count and Post count.
The result is I have to open every box to see what might be new.
At least that's the way I see it, but maybe I'm wrong?

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 7:36 pm
by Moto
You are correct.

The recent topics section does what you want, but if you are away from the site for more than a few hours topics you may want to read get aged out by activity.

I will have to setup a second theme make it look similar to the old forum. I'll try to get around to it this week sometime. It takes many hours to setup a new theme.

If you would like a basic clean look you can activate the "prosilver" theme
Click your name on the top right corner --> User control panel-->board preferences -->My board style: set it to prosilver and hit submit.

Once I have a similar theme cleaned up and ready to rock I may disable prosilver, but for now anyone who wants to switch is free to do so.

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 7:45 pm
by KuroNekko
I personally don't think it's that bad. It's new and will take a learning curve to navigate it, but I'm not really seeing any real setbacks either from casual browsing and posting. The "Recent Topics" section and the "Notifications" do make it easier to keep track of newer posts and comments than before for me.
I'll be uploading photos in a new thread later so I'll see how it works in that regard then.

Re: Site feedback time

Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 7:50 pm
by Moto
I haven't tried to upload anything on the new platform, but I would think it should be easier.

Browsing and notifications actually work a lot better now.