The new site pre-launch updates

Google early, Google often.....

Holy Moly, will I still know how to walk the forum without drowning in topics, posts, categories, cache, memcache, and bbp (or whatsit)? I presume it'll be a lot easier than it sounds.
Good luck with the big launch, Craven.

Oh, avatars... will those stick around?

Ok, I'll try to translate:

Categories:

Right now we only have 1 level of forums. Forums can't contain other forums. So we can't support a very diverse coverage of topics without overloading that initial level more than it already is.

The new site can nest categories as much as we want, which means they can be inside each other.

So, for example we can have: North America > United States > California > San Diego

Design Principles:

Our new look is going to be PLAIN. It will not wow, it's meant to be very functional.

Navigation:

Pay attention to the tabs we introduce. Basically, we are going out of our way to make navigation of such a large site work.

WYSIWYG



Basically, you don't need to use bbcode on the new site. There's an editor that lets you format text and images without using code (though you can still do it that way).

THREADING

Replies are going to be tied to posts (not just a thread) and this will allow us to help navigate large threads by letting you follow a trail of responses to specific posts. This doesn't mean a fully threaded view (for those who hate that) but rather a threaded compliment to the existing "flat" view.

So we can do things like:

- give you email updates to replies to your specific posts, not an entire thread
- show you responses to your posts in a large thread

TOPIC TYPES

We are going to have different topic types that will have different features. Questions, Discussions, and News are examples of ways we can make more specific featuresets for different uses of the site.

TOPIC CATEGORIZATION

We are moving from editor/moderator managed higlighting of topics (currently called "featured topics") to a user-driven model where user participation and selection is what determines featured content.

CACHING

The site will sacrifice freshness (e.g. the topic view count may be several minutes old) for performance. This will mean both fast page loads as well as the ability to handle much more traffic without slowing down due to load. The only downside is that some things you are used to seeing instantly may take up to a minute to be reflected on the site. We'll prioritize but there may be scenarios where you post your topic (which you can see instantly) but the search pages don't list your topic for 30 seconds.

In regard to questions about avatars and images in posts:

Avatars - The site will probably launch without avatars. We have a more ambitious photo solution planned and at this point I'm not sure whether it will replace avatars or whether both will exist. What is fairly clear is that we'll be deferring this and launching without avatars (though we can preserve the avatars to restore them).

Images in posts:

The editor will allow for easier image insertion, and we have things like image attributes planned (that would allow you to specify things like image size and alignment) but the ultimate question is whether you have to upload elsewhere.

At launch yes. But we have definite plans to have direct upload support. How that will work is still up in the air but at the very very least a paid solution will be available and more likely a basic solution (small initial space) with support to pay for more space is what we'll go with.

In any case, we'll have to crunch the numbers when we get to that, as we'll need to ensure we don't spend time building something that we can't pay for once it gets out of control.

I expect that we can find a way to cover the costs of the feature at reasonable configurations of total space and file size maximums for free so it's likely that we'll have something for that at some point but we'll have to think it through.

Will we be seeing a lot of the typical stuff on message boards that have huge graphics and photos as signatures on every single post?

And, if so, will we be able to customize filters that will suppress the display of these things so we don't have to see the clutter?

No, hell if I thought it would go over well I'd do away with signatures altogether. But at worst it will be plain-text sigs with the option to hide them.

I have as much fun with signatures as the next guy but they are really just clutter.

No avatar?















I'm gutted.

Thanks for everything, Craven.

We still have hamsters it appears.

A few quick comments -- words to the wise --

Since avatars and PMs may not be available to start, I suggest that members might want to do the following:

1. Save your avatar if it's not already on your hard drive. Just right-click the image and save it to your desktop.
   
2. Save your PMs. Just copy and paste them to Word Pad. They aren't going to be deleted but you may not be able to see them for a while so if there is something in there that you need, such as phone numbers or whatever, take precautions. And,
   
3. Exchange email addresses with people who you normally PM with now, if you wish to maintain a dialogue with them while PMs are (possibly) down.

You don't need to do this, but it's something you can do in preparation and it might be helpful to you in the short run.

Thanks for the advice, jes. Also thanks for saying something I actually understand.

dp wrote-



It's a strain.

K - so thats er... all way over the top of my head....

but hey

glad you guys know what you're doing. Grateful for that - what would we do without A2K a?

so....................................... just when is all this happening then? Will we get flashy lights and big loud boinging through our speakers to let us know?


or should I already know that and have just not been listening