Forum software upgrade on the way

[Dona Ferentes]

Very clean. (on mobile)

 

[SirRumpole]

All seems ok. So much like the old one in function that there is little to cause confusion.

Well done Joe.

 

[galumay]

So far so good. I will have to look at whats going on with the "new posts", it seems to include all posts without the filters I had previously to remove a lot of the content. EDIT- Just had to go to each of the forums/threads i wanted to remove and "ignore" them again.

The upgraded blocking feature will be great, will stop the serial trolls I have on ignore.

Overall it looks very clean and minimal which is great.

 

[basilio]

Well done! Huge amount of work and does look better.
It will be interesting to see what the new features are and how they impact on the site.

One extra comment.
I find the new layout a bit light to read. The contrast is now greyer and more subtle. The eyes ain't so good. Is there any way to darken the text from my end? Does anyone else have similar thoughts ?

Cheers

 

[Joe Blow]

Going to bed after five cups of coffee leads to a terrible night's sleep with bad dreams of forum trolls and spammers.

But I'm up now and pouring another cup to ready myself to spend the day tweaking the upgraded software.

It's great that there are so few complaints so far but I am happy to hear them if anyone has any suggestions. Things like font sizes and colours are easy to change.

But yes, mobile is looking much better. Those accessing ASF on a phone or a tablet will have a much easier time now.

 

[cutz]

Looks good, seems to load much faster my end.. Good job !

 

[Dona Ferentes]

I'm going to have to go to Avatar school. Can anyone suggest one that reveals no personality?

 

[Joe Blow]

I'm going to have to go to Avatar school. Can anyone suggest one that reveals no personality?

There are endless possibilities with avatars and you can create them from almost any image. Nature, landscapes, movie stars, musicians, historical figures, your own photos, anything really....

 

[Joe Blow]

One new feature of this upgraded software is push notifications, which most people will know as browser notifications. You can set them to activate for a range of alerts, which can be set in your account preferences. See screenshot below.

 

[Joe Blow]

Still working away in the background. If anyone comes across any bugs, errors or weird behaviour please let me know. Still early days yet.

Thanks.

 

[explod]

Nicely set out, good work Joe

 

[Ferret]

Looks good, Joe, and working well for me.

Really appreciate your continued commitment to this great forum.

 

[Joules MM1]

@Joe Blow

outstanding !!

 

[Joe Blow]

Thanks guys. I'm glad the new site is working for you and you're happy with it. Still some bugs to be ironed out but we're getting there.

Please keep on posting, especially on stocks, so I can say that all the time and money spent on the upgrade was worth it.

 

[MrChow]

Like seeing Recent Posts so clearly.

I'd request a 'more' option if possible so you could extend that part.

 

[Joe Blow]

Like seeing Recent Posts so clearly.

I'd request a 'more' option if possible so you could extend that part.

I wanted one too, but unfortunately the "More" option with this Recent Posts widget does things differently than the same option on the old widget. The "More" on the old widget linked you directly to the "Recent Posts" page, while "More" on this widget just pushes down the widgets below it and displays five more posts immediately below it.

The end result of this is that the right sidebar just keeps on going further and further down which causes the whole Forum Home page to look very out of balance as blank white space starts appearing immediately to the left of the sidebar.

I will ask the developer is he would consider making a "More" option that does the same as the old widget.

 

[Joe Blow]

Another new feature of the upgraded software is the "unfurling" of URLs. In short, "unfurling" is the creation of a richer preview of a link which includes the page title, metadata logo, description and website favicon.

Here's an example:

Victorian Government announces 'biggest package of business support' state has ever seen

The Victorian Government announces a coronavirus business support package worth about $3 billion, which Premier Daniel Andrews calls the "biggest package of business support" the state has ever seen.

www.abc.net.au

If, for some reason, you would prefer not to have a link presented in this format, all you have to do is edit your post and remove "unfurl="true" from the URL tags (see below) and the link will then be displayed as a plain URL.

 

[galumay]

2 little things Joe, firstly its odd having the date/time of a post above the author - in most forums, on the old version of this one, to see the latest post in a thread you click on the date/time which is usually below the author. Being back to front means i intuitively click the wrong thing!
(i suspect this is only happening in the New Posts view actually).

The other one I may be wrong, but I thought ASX Stock Chat only had the sub forums of the 3 groups of ASK Stocks, now it has a whole lot of other threads I dont want to see, but will now have to ignore as they are created. All I want to see in recent posts is the 3 groups of ASX Stocks and the Announcements and site news forum.

 

[Joe Blow]

2 little things Joe, firstly its odd having the date/time of a post above the author - in most forums, on the old version of this one, to see the latest post in a thread you click on the date/time which is usually below the author. Being back to front means i intuitively click the wrong thing!
(i suspect this is only happening in the New Posts view actually).

I'll look into this.

All I want to see in recent posts is the 3 groups of ASX Stocks and the Announcements and site news forum.

Then you should just ignore entire forums instead of threads. However, I haven't fully tested the ignore functionality properly yet and suspect there are possibly issues with it because it is not core functionality but add-on functionality. Add-on functionality sometimes doesn't play nicely with other add-ons.

If there are issues with it I will have to look into using alternatives, or perhaps custom coding. The two-way ignore functionality and the thread/forum ignore functionality are two separate add-ons created by different developers. So there may be conflicts and other problems such an incompatibility issues.

 

[galumay]

Then you should just ignore entire forums instead of threads.

I cant in this case, its because of the layout, maybe it just needs another sub forum? (its probably only me that has this issue so also probably better to ignore!)

The 'header' forum is ASX Stock Chat, I only want to see the sub forums, "Stocks 0-H", Stocks I-P" and "Stocks Q-Z" but there are dozens of threads that are directly in the ASX Stock Chat header forum and the only way to hide them is to individually ignore them and then ignore new ones as they are created. It would be solved if they were in a seperate sub-forum like the stock threads. If i hide the ASX Stock Chat forum I lose all the individual company threads in my new posts feed.