CANCELLED: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

[Joel]

Well, the good news is that these maintenance plans have now been scrapped.

The bad news is we've decided to accelerate some other plans for the future which are much worse much better instead, and we'll have more details soon

Thanks all

Hi all,

Just to let you know that we will be performing maintenance on our forum from around 1pm on Tuesday 27th May until the early hours of Wednesday 28th May 2014.

This is so we can perform several updates to our forum platform to improve performance and stability of the software and our server.

There will be some changes implemented in this maintenance period also:

- 'Pretty' forum URLs will be removed
This add-on feature actually causes some massive strain on our server to implement, and no longer serves any useful feature to aid search engine optimisation - and given its cost in server performance, we no longer feel that it is worth the performance hit for the benefit it brings.

URLs will revert back to their original 'numeric' form, rather than featuring the topic name as present.

- 'Thanks' will return
We're currently trialling some alternative systems that better work with the latest SMF software and other features we have to offer, and hopefully we should have an alternative system for thanks.

- Site wide alerts/messages to be removed
Again evaluating the usage and performance of this feature has led to its removal, and you will now only see 'alerts' and 'message counts' when you are browsing the forum pages within the /talk/ section of the site. You should continue to see your sign-in information and avatar on other pages, but we will not feature alerts or message notifications any longer.

- Clean up of HTML and other page styling elements
In preparation for some upcoming exciting changes, you may notice some small layout or style changes to the pages so we can bring you a fresher and more versatile TowersStreet experience, as well as some other exciting upcoming changes.

We may include some further changes if they develop more over the coming days in time for this feature change maintenance period

As always, chat will be available for the duration of the maintenance period, however the forum and its features will not.

If you do have any other questions, please do not hesitate to post a reply here and we'll do our best to respond.

Thanks all!

 

[Burbs]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

Yay, the return of 'Thanks'!!!

You really don't know what you have until it's gone.

 

[MattyH]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

@Joel will the tagging system still remain?

 

[Scott]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

Can't wait for chat - I love a good downtime panic sosche!

 

[Poisson]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

You legend, do you have the special offline screen and Dial Up audio ready for the inevitable breakage?

 

[Jonathan]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

You legend, do you have the special offline screen and Dial Up audio ready for the inevitable breakage?

I hope that you're not thinking of that version of Test Card F, Tom...

 

[Joel]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

Tagging should be remaining yes

 

[delta79]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

You legend, do you have the special offline screen and Dial Up audio ready for the inevitable breakage?

I hope that you're not thinking of that version of Test Card F, Tom...

How about Test card F (HD-W)



Gentle people start your photoshopping

 

[Poisson]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

You legend, do you have the special offline screen and Dial Up audio ready for the inevitable breakage?

I hope that you're not thinking of that version of Test Card F, Tom...

How about Test card F (HD-W)



Gentle people start your photoshopping

The usual photoshopped version is terrifying....

 

[Jordan]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

 

[Joel]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

There was one with my face on it too... argh!

Well, the good news is that these maintenance plans have now been scrapped.

The bad news is we've decided to accelerate some other plans for the future which are much worse much better instead, and we'll have more details soon

 

[Poisson]

Any particular reason for the U-turn?

 

[Joel]

Re: Forum Maintenance - Tuesday 27th May

[..] decided to accelerate some other plans for the future [..]

As I'd said (but now in a little more detail), we were planning some bigger changes to the forums over the coming year, and now decided that we're going to bring those forward a lot further which kinda nulls what we were planning to do in this maintenance and makes it somewhat pointless

I'm really not happy with SMF at the moment with a lack of development progress and support for features dropping, so we're busy working on some other options that will look to replace the forum software completely instead.

 

[Anonymous]

phpBB please...

 

[Burbs]

phpBB please...

Yeah, just try and do a better job than a certain other forum.

 

[Craig]

Yeah, just try and do a better job than a certain other forum.

We're very aware people do like a lot of features of the current forum and the way it works, so we'll be conscious of that whilst we're working on things in the background. That said, we know there's also a lot of things that people have wanted to see that either we haven't been able to do with the current software or have umm broken in recent months.

So at the moment, don't worry too much - our aim is to improve what we have at the moment. It's early days but I think overall we think you'll like it

Any particular reason for the U-turn?

Because we're far more impressionable to making changes when discussing them at silly o clock in the morning .

In all seriousness though, this isn't a kneejerk reaction, it's something we've been thinking about for a long time now. It's just we felt it a bit of a needless action to fix something that will ultimately, still have the same issues popping up in future that we're trying to get rid of.

 

[Poisson]

I'd hit the Thanks button but....

 

[Jordan]

What is the message board software of choice nowadays? SMF, phpBB and MyBB haven't had any significant updates in years.

 

[Dave]

What is the message board software of choice nowadays? SMF, phpBB and MyBB haven't had any significant updates in years.

We where thinking of using the system Rideas uses.

 

[Jordan]

Not sure if trolling - I can't seem to get the Rideas website to work.

Vanilla is quite a nice message board, actually. More of a focus on the latest discussions than things being in category buckets.