Forum Upgrade Completed

[Dave]

The forum upgrade is now complete. We are aware of a problem with Active Topics, Mike is currently working on this.

We have re-enabled posting in the forum, please post any problems you see in this thread.

[DavidW]

It looks like Active Topics is some way towards normal operation - though it's still not right. It's only apparently showing one page of Active Topics under any circumstance, and some of the threads it's showing as active aren't (and don't have the 'active' icon next to them). I guess you know this anyway.

I look forward to a fix on this - I find it hard to use the forums without this feature working properly as I'll miss threads I might have replied in.


On a purely vanity related front (seeing as I seem to have been 'promoted' to Valued Member status) it seems that the "sort by group" option in the Members page doesn't work as you'd expect. It sorts in the order "Pocket GPS Staff", "Administrator", "Guest", "Senior Member" (1 user has this status, and (s)he's never posted), "Standard Member" and "Valued Member" last of all (which seems to be me and those who were formerly recognised as GPS Developer status). I know my place.

In star order, that's 4, 5, 0, 3, 1, 2. It's neither alphabetical nor numerical!


The new software does look better - though I miss the "Edit" and "Delete" options that were available for a short time after you posted on the old forums. They were useful when you spotted a mistake almost immediately (they disappeared fairly quickly). Seemingly you can't do anything if you spot a mistake now.


Many of my old posts contain links to other posts elsewhere in the forum, and I had thought that the change in the URL schema used would have broken these links. However, they work fine - well done!


The emoticon window seems the wrong shape. As it is, clicking the "more..." link (at the left of the editor window) pops it up slightly too narrow to avoid a horizontal scroll bar.

If you resize that that window to a sufficient size to show all the smileys, you'll probably need at least a 1280x1024 screen (which I have, but not everyone does) to get the whole window on screen. Could it be wider and shorter?



Good luck on sponsorship and advertising. The new setup seems less sluggish, but I can imagine that running these forums places a pretty heavy load on the database server (and such equipment costs money!).


Overall - well done. A faster server setup would be nice (I've seen generating the search window take 12 seconds), but the whole setup is a huge improvement.



David

[Dave]

Active Topics is being worked on by Mike, but I can't give a date when it will be fixed. There seems to be some very buggy code (of which we haven't written) which we need to overcome.

There are numerous enhancements to the forum. Here's just a few enhancements

1. More emoticons
2. Previous/Next Topic added to each thread
3. Larger avatars
4. Uploading of your own Avatars to the server rather than hosting them off-server
5. AOL/MSN/Yahoo IM logos under profile
6. We now have greater control over user groups so we can segment people into various user groups or beta forums
7. When you reach a number of posts, you will be elevated to the next level. Here's something to look forward to.... Standard Member 0-399, Valued Member 400-999, Senior Member 1000+
8. Mike worked extremely hard on making sure the links weren't broken, which was one of my main fears, so thanks to Mike for making sure that this and the whole of the forum migration went smoothly!

We need to make quite a few little tweaks here and there, like the emoticons window, adding in the new driver emoticons (if I can locate them on my hdd), also I need to completely re-code the mobile forums from the ground up (these are currently offline). Forums do put an immense load on the site, but also the downloads, POI's and the Sync Service. We're going to have a heavy sponsorship push to bring in some money to move the site across several higher performance servers. I'm not sure when this will happen, but it will certainly enhance the experience at Pocket GPS.

[DavidW]

I'm very grateful for all the hard work - and have noticed many of the improvements you've mentioned!

I know it'll take some time from what you've said, but hopefully when we get Active Topics back it will be free of the problems that plagued it in the past (it sometimes went screwy for a few days for no good reasons). Patience is clearly needed over this feature - hopefully Mike's patience isn't too worn over it (some bits of code are just destined to frustrate...).



David

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