New Look A&R Forum, and it's not my fault this time!

Andrew76

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117641334#Comment_117641334

Yep.

I understand that they have little resources (and possibly little experience with a migration like this?) but that means you take extra care and time with something like this. It was mentioned they had been planning this for months - it really does not look like that at all. I wonder how they settled on Vanilla as the platform to move to, if it was me I would have reached out to the community for suggestions or advice after doing a bucket load of research - spend as long as it takes to make sure it is fit for purpose and includes all the major functionality you need on top of fixing whatever legacy issues prompted the move in the first place. Also, if you know Vanilla don't work weekends and are 5 hrs behind us, do not start the process on a Wednesday, wait until you can start it on a Monday.

Create a separate environment on the new platform and migrate a backup of the full data at a point in time and test the crap out of the new system while the old live environment is still working away. That will at least tell you how long the data migration itself will take. You won't find all issues but for sure you will spot the major ones - then fix them. After a shed load of testing (include users in this as one dev and a couple of other staff members can only do so much) and fixes, go read-only and do a live migration of the current data and you should be in a fairly decent place.

The amount of issues the new site has, it's clear as day not enough research or testing was done before the migration kicked off. Madness for any business imo.

KeRbDoG

Wonder why they didn't stick with vBulletin and upgrade to the newer version

Mr.Saturn

Is everyone getting 400 notifications every time someone so much as thinks about posting or is that just me? Have every single possible notification turned off but boom, there they are. Every time. Without fail.

Andrew76

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117644183#Comment_117644183

Yeah I think everyone is getting extra notifications they shouldn't be. For me it's Richersounds.

Esel

Look at the settings via Your Profile -> Notifications

Mr.Saturn

I have all possible notifications toggled to off via the above method and I still logged into 41 notifications today. I'm starting to get the sense it might not be me.

Andrew76

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117645695#Comment_117645695

😂

It's definitely not you or your notification settings. Whatever changes were applied during the downtime the other night has caused the issue. I just don't bother looking at them anymore.

o1s1n

No notifications here, feel oddly left out! :(

The lack of a 'my forums' drop down is still murdering the place for me. Its taking me an age to actually get to anything. I might just set up a few bookmarks in Chrome to bring me straight to the forums I use.

Just staying well clear of the mobile site. When I'm on my phone I'm sticking to the full desktop version and that's kind of working for me for now.

Lemming

No notifications here, feel oddly left out! :(

Same as myself. Maybe I'm just unpopular.

Also this new selective quote stuff is absolute @rse (just trying it out now) and so incredibly user-unfriendly and downright clunky; no attributing to whom you are quoting and I'm having to manually copy & paste what I want to quote.

o1s1n

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117647318#Comment_117647318

Tried figuring out how to selectively quote from the above without consulting anything for instructions (which to be honest, it should be THAT easy) and nope, haven't a bean!

Lemming

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117647387#Comment_117647387

When you quote, there's that inverted |P symbol (saw there is a name for it earlier but fvcked if I can remember it). If you click on that you get extra options to do things like quotes, code blocks, etc. but as I said it's still clunky AF, unintuitive and it doesn't attribute the quote to a user-post like vbulletin did.

I have also noticed that you cannot move the cursor up and down through lines in a comment as easily since it moves up and down by paragraph, not line. So moving backwards to correct a typo becomes a pain in the hole.

What a sh1t show.

Retr0gamer

The categories list is also a total mess compared to how nicely it was organised in the previous one and in the previous drop down method.

On a positive note the current affairs/I'm not racist but/imho forum is buried so deep in it that I no longer have to control my impulse to take a look at what is happening there and spend the day arguing with racist bigoted arseholes.

Lemming

On a positive note the current affairs/I'm not racist but/imho forum is buried so deep in it that I no longer have to control my impulse to take a look at what is happening there and spend the day arguing with racist bigoted arseholes.

Small mercies ... as much as I say I'm not blowing away time on boards, I find myself frequenting the Helpdesk forum a lot at the moment; it's the new replacement for AH as the popcorn-entertainment forum i.e. someone asks something outrageously racist/stupid/etc. except replace the usual AH sewage with discussion about the "upgrade".

CiDeRmAn

I'm definitely spending a lot less time here, which is a positive for my place of work but not so good for me

Andrew76

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117647644#Comment_117647644

That symbol is called a pilcrow. It took boards screwing up a migration for me to finally Google wtf it's proper name is. 😂

Optimus Prime

Its shocking how bad this is, my forums are all in alphabetical order instead of "latest post". I also cant move anything in the Arcade and Retro Marketplace to the Archive. Not sure who to even ask about that one. The whole thing is unusable at the minute.

KeRbDoG

I wonder what the traffic to the site is like now

Tom Mann Centuria

https://boards.ie/discussion/comment/117650581#Comment_117650581

Especially if you were to remove all the "This new site is crap" posts. Feedback is one of the few forums I can easily find now.

KeRbDoG

Is the side menu 'Categories Click arrow to toggle category' a new thing? It's allowing me to find the sub forums since the top menu was done away with in this new Boards version

The Last Bandit

Ya seems to be new alright, its a welcome addition.. and read threads are thankfully no longer in bold

Retr0gamer

In fairness they are making changes and making it better

Inviere

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117739757#Comment_117739757

Indeed, at this rate by Christmas the site should be somewhat back to where it was in June. All we're seeing is that little to no testing was done, and the pieces are being picked up little by little. Nice to see some improvements for sure, but I refuse to celebrate fixes to things that should never have been broken to begin with.

DaveyDave

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117739211#Comment_117739211

Just noticed that now, glad to see. The visuals of the new forum were awful on mobile as the colours and text were all the same. Hopefully it will continue to 'improve' and have it back as it was.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117739211#Comment_117739211

It's amazing how much that one little thing makes the place so much easier to read.

Baffling that it wasn't there from day 1.

Inviere

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117741194#Comment_117741194

We can thank a user for that one too (acknowledged in the Feedback forum). So not even a Boards fix.

Andrew76

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117741364#Comment_117741364

Yep, without those posters and their scripts the site is an awful lot worse on desktop. Also, how anyone uses it without Dark Reader or some equivalent dark theme is beyond me, the white is blinding.

I see they pushed more broken updates to the mobile version - the top banner with the burger menu is no longer sticky (which would be ok if it reappeared when needed but it doesn't) so to get back to Categories you have to scroll back to the top every time. And the Categories menu itself is expanded but broken, thank god you can at least still click the word Categories to get to your followed forums. Also, what's with the manky bright blue colour change?

As you said - what sort of testing is being done before changes are pushed live - not enough or none. One step forward, several steps back (and still way behind what we had before the change over).

Inviere

@Andrew76 this is all I can think of lately about Boards....

https://youtu.be/_xdK7wduVdY

Andrew76

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117746290#Comment_117746290

:pac::pac:

That gave me a chuckle! And it looks like they've fixed those mobile issues - or reverted back to before they were applied.

CiDeRmAn

I mostly use Boards via my phone and it does seem to be better this morning, which is great.

My fear is those folks who have simply left, not to return.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117746413#Comment_117746413

I see they finally have the menu at the top persistent while you scroll down the page, that'll make a huge difference to the mobile version. It was getting very frustrating having to scroll to the top every time.