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State of the site and ongoing issues - Updates

  • 05-08-2021 8:01am
    #1
    Administrators, Computer Games Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 32,052 Admin ✭✭✭✭✭


    I'm going to start this thread to collect announcements from the office as they happen so people can have a bit more visibility of them if they aren't following the discussion threads elsewhere in feedback. I'll copy them here as they happen or Odhran and Niamh can update them here themselves if they get a chance.

    For discussion of the announcements posters can go here: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058198814/welcome-to-the-new-boards-ie-platform-version-1-0#latest

    You should be able to find previous updates by going to the comments page on Odhran's profile here: https://www.boards.ie/profile/comments/Boards.ie%3A%20Odhran

    Latest update from @Boards.ie: Odhran yesterday evening:

    Hi all

    We have not had a massive amount to update over the past few days as a lot of the work has been in creating PR’s - hence not posting here until we do.

    As I have said from the start we are clearly not happy with how the migration has gone. We are working to resolve all issues as quickly as we can. We have upped our dev resource and are working our way through major issues as quickly as we can. We expect to see better fixes from a discoverability perspective shortly and will keep working through the list.We will continue to update you all as we go.

    Some new updates:

    • We have been writing a module last that will give us control navigation on both desktop and mobile and our PR submitted today. That will allow us to have control over navigation for top nav etc. We might gave an interm solution to roll out ahead of that tomorrow - but we do expect this to be approved in a couple of days.
    • Included in the above is follow functionality on forums and sub forums on both Mobile and Desktop
    • Regional forums are all showing correctly now
    • We have made some improvements to category structures which has improved site speed - please let us know if you are still experiencing speed issues
    • We are in the process of archiving all deleted forums which will again improve speed.
    • Looking at overall design for mobile (particularly homepage view) but conscious of not making any changes there until we fix the broader issues around Navigation / Discoverability
    • Pagination issue missing from the Motors forum and has been fixed now

    I have said several times that we are not happy with the length of time that it is taking to get stuff live. We have resourced up the dev team again and are working on the above. However as I said before we have had to take a differnt approach and are working our way through that now. I hope to have a more robust update before the weekend. Some have asked about an email issue which effected a small number of users - Niamh has posted an update regarding that and did indeed make me aware so I am fully in the loop. I will be writing to the DPC to make them aware of this specific issue later today.

    I appreciate that this has been a frustrating couple of weeks for everyone - us included. We are seeing a bit of light however so please bear with us.

    I would like to thank you all again for your patience.

    Odhran

    Post edited by Boards.ie: Mike on


Comments

  • Administrators, Computer Games Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 32,052 Admin ✭✭✭✭✭Mickeroo


    Thread on issues with deleted PMs resurfacing: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058202615/private-deleted-messages-from-10-years-ago-have-reappeared#latest


    Update on the deleted PM issues :


    Hi all

    Just a quick update on this. We are treating this very seriously. It has been escalated to Vanilla's Director of Compliance and Information Security, Chief Product Officer and Director of Development who are actively working on the issue. As a temporary step, we will be deleting all old Private messages that are older than 30 days from today August 6th, 2021 shortly.

    This will give us the time that is needed to do a proper analysis and work on restoring the migrated file correctly.

    We will update you here with next steps.

    Thanks for your understanding

    Odhran

    Post edited by Mickeroo on


  • Administrators, Computer Games Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 32,052 Admin ✭✭✭✭✭Mickeroo


    https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117718769#Comment_117718769

    Morning all

    We had expected that we would have an interm fix for navigation and follow forums live on desktop yesterday however that did not happen. I hope that will be live on Monday ahead of a larger update next week which includes amongst other items fixes to navigation on both mobile and desktop

    Deleted PMs - the decision to remove all old PM's was taken last night as first step while engineers work on re-importing the migrated file. We will be providing a full report on that which will include why deleted PM's were visible in the first place.

    edit - PM’s that were not deleted will be available again after import.

    I will update again as soon as I have further information.

    Odhran



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 148 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Odhran
    Boards.ie Employee


    Hi folks

    • Deleted PM's should be restored today. Private messages aren't deleted in vBulletin until both parties delete the message. So they work more like conversations than individual messages. That should be fixed this evening (ie your own deleted messages will be deleted and all other messages restored). We will provide more detail on that later this week once a full analysis is complete.
    • Working on the above over the weekend pushed our planned interm fix for desktop navigation. We will be getting that out tomorrow instead. We did get an interm fix for Myforums so you can both follow and view forums you have followed. Please note two things: 1. This is just a redirect using the mobile theme view so its a little slow to switch and 2. This does not include forums you have followed pre migration. We will be able to do this but have not got to it yet unfortunately. However, you can follow forums now on both mobile and desktop.
    • The larger update I mentioned which pushes hard fixes for amongst other things - navigation across both platforms, will be in review tonight.

    Thanks

    Odhran



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 148 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Odhran
    Boards.ie Employee


    Hi again

    Follow forums functionality has been improved to allow users:

    • Follow: This option will allow you to follow the category without getting email notifications
    • Discussions: This option will allow you to follow the category and receive notifications when new discussions are added
    • Discussions and Comments: This option will allow you to follow the category and receive notifications when new discussions and comments are posted
    • Unfollow: This option will appear once you choose to follow and subscribe to notifications, and will allow you to unfollow and disable notifications
    • The button has changed to a bell for now and can be accessed here.
    • We have also pushed a temporary category navigation fix for desktop which you will find on the right hand side of the page. This is just until we get our permanent navigation live. We have a few bits to cleanup on style and layout tomorrow.
    • We will work on similar update for navigation on mobile tomorrow also.
    • Various updates to certain categories to further increase site speed
    • The My Forums tab on homepage desktop does flicker a bit and show the old view (which was just MyThreads replicated). It's clunky and jumps a bit but this is just an interm fix
    • All deleted PM's and PM's older than 30 days restored.

    Thanks

    Odhran



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 148 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Odhran
    Boards.ie Employee


    Hi all

    You will have seen from yesterdays update that we pushed desktop navigation to the right panel. It's in need of a bit of polish ... but the second phase in updating desktop navigation is to place it back to top nav as before which is WIP. We might not do anymore cleanup on the style of the right nav (for now) as they will be gone shortly and replaced by the top Nav. However, we will now have the facility to use more than one type of navigation (top and right) which we will come back to over the coming weeks - ie we can use the right panel to bubble up Q&A, Busy threads, Popular forums etc...

    Mobile nav phase 1 has also just been pushed live and you will now be able to access all categories, forums and sub forums from the burger menu /categories.

    More to follow....

    Thanks, Odhran



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  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    Hi all, another update is just gone live there now - unread threads are now bolded and read threads are unbolded to help you differentiate between what you have or haven't read in a forum or on the homepage. I am told that credit is due to @fritzelly for posting info on this fix, so thank you fritzelly! 😍

    On a slightly related note, if you click on 'Mark All Viewed' on the menu on mobile, it takes this job very seriously and marks the whole site as read (and unbolded) so be careful with it.




  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    Evening all,

    I think you have already spotted most of the updates today but I will list them here for anyone who has missed them:

    Breadcrumb thread title on mobile & desktop (hat tip to @Ads by Google for the info on this one)

    Notification bar fixed on mobile top bar for logged in users

    'Sign In' and 'Register' fixed on mobile top bar for logged out users

    'Announcement' is now 'Sticky on mobile as it is on Desktop

    Thanks all, hopefully we'll have a few more tomorrow!



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    A small update for today

    • The notification bar on mobile view has been condensed to sit in the top bar now to take up less space
    • The mobile homepage was updated to show more info per thread (last poster, last post time, replies, views) - we'll look at possibly condensing this down a bit more to take up one less line if it can be done
    • the site will be reindexed this evening in an effort to fix the inaccurate search results

    That's it for today, we're working on other things as well that just weren't ready yet but we'll hopefully have more for you on Monday. Have a great weekend everyone 🙂

    



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    Evening all.

    Vanilla are still working on the notifications issue I'm afraid. I have asked them to roll back whatever update caused it to happen and to look at an actual fix after that instead of you getting inundated with notifications any longer.

    My Forums is still something we are working on but is not a Vanilal feature so something we have to create ourselves. It'll be done but just not ready yet.

    Site slowness seems to still be an issue for some, not sure if that was just today or other days too.

    Finally, we switched on tagging today so when you start a new thread you have the option to tag it with keywords to help other users find it more easily via search. The tags will also display on the bottom of the post. You won't be forced to add tags but the option is there. There are a lot of tags saved there from previous, (much) older threads. I have removed the worst of them (I think & hope) but if anything dodgy is suggested to you as a tag, please let me know. I can edit or delete them easily enough. A list of popular tags are also displayed at the very bottom of the homepage on mobile.

    Sorry there isn't more of an update, we'll have more for you next week.






  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    'Bookmark this discussion' has been added beneath the comment box so that you can follow any thread that you comment on if you want. If you don't want to follow the thread, simply untick the box. I have discovered that if you are the OP it doesn't actually bookmark your thread but that is a bug which I have now reported.

    The mass amount of notifications were rolled back on Friday night also so nobody should be getting inundated with unwanted notifications any more.

    Thanks all, we will be back later with more for you hopefully.



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  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    Hi all,

    You will be glad to know that Dispute Resolution is back up and running as is Help Desk with @Spear and @Shield at the helm of both. They are now taking care of the Help & Feedback category as the two category mods here, not an easy task as you might imagine so I'd like to thank both of them for that.

    There have been lots of reports about image size. We have increased the max size so that there are no more illegible images, it seems to happen to screenshots in particular. Hopefully the new size is big enough, if not we can adjust it again.

    That's all for this evening everyone, thanks for reading :)



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    A few small updates today, you may have noticed some of them already as they were done late Friday/over the weekend.

    'Mark all viewed' has been removed from the mobile burger menu

    'Top Forums' link has replaced it on the mobile burger menu

    Max image size has been increased again to 1084px x 1084px to accommodate the Photography forum



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    Update from 03/09 that I forgot to post in here:

    Evening everyone, just a couple of small updates here today.

    A new 'New Discussion' button has been added to the top of the homepage on mobile in response to users who were unsure of how to post. There had just been one at the very bottom of the page which wasn't too easy to discover.


    When logged out the 'New Discussion' button was cut off (just said 'New Disc') but that button has been fixed also.


    There is now a new Top Forums box on the desktop homepage to direct you to the busiest of the forums without having to go via the Categories menu. We hope this will help a lot of you until My Forums are up and running. We'll replicate this function on mobile but it's not live there yet.



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    The update we had last night made the following changes:

    - timestamp on the homepage on desktop has been fixed, it was previously one hour out of sync

    - Digiweb removed from the footer as this was out of date information

    - Navigation menu added to the top bar - this is still being worked on as some lists are spilling past the confines of the screen and some forum names are too long to fit in the menu

    - Ads enabled - up to now there were no ads on mobile and very few on desktop, this has now been rectified and will ensure that we have an income of some sort. 



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    We added a small update yesterday to user profiles on teh desktop site so that you have the same functionality as on mobile.

    You can now cahnge password, change your profile pic, change your signature, access your ignore list and see a list of your own posts (comments) from this menu on a desktop profile.




  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    You can now access your thanked posts (on desktop only right now).

    Go to your profile page by clicking on your avatar in the top navigation bar and click again on your avatar or username in the dropdown menu to take you to your profile. You will see a button labelled 'Reactions'. Click on this and all of your thanked posts will be listed underneath with how many thanks they received.




  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    New FOLLOWED FORUMS and MENU feature alert 📢

    On Mobile

    We have added 'Followed Forums' to the burger menu today on the top left hand side of the mobile screen. It is situated between 'Regional' and 'Categories'


    When you tap on it, it will open a little list of your followed forums like this


    On Desktop

    Some of you may have noticed already but we have removed the super reactive menu on the top navigation bar on the desktop site. When you click on Topics now, it will open a new menu on the side where you can click through to the forums that you want.

    We have also added a FOLLOWED FORUMS tab (at last 🤗) it is located on the top right hand side of the navigation bar (where the Adverts tab used to be)


    Clicking on this will open a side bar with an alphabetical list of your followed forums.

    Hopefully that is helpful to some of you, I am delighted to have this feature back anyway!



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    The TRENDING TAB on the desktop homepage is back up and working - no more July content for another six months. Sorry it took so long, despite being an easy change in the end it required some wading through a lot of parameters and functions to get to what needed to be changed.




  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    The time stamp has been added to mobile posts it's now dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm instead of Month-YYYY on all posts.

    Also mobile pagination has been updated to always include Pg 1 which was previously missing when you were a few pages into a long thread.



  • Boards.ie Employee Posts: 12,597 ✭✭✭✭✭Boards.ie: Niamh
    Boards.ie Community Manager


    I'm on mobile and I can't see the option to Report a post any more...

    This has been moved to the little 3 dots menu on mobile posts as highlighted below.




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