Some changes you'll notice in the forum soon

[developer (ChrisB)]

With a goal of improving the forum’s performance (speed) and stability (reduce page load errors) we’re going to make some changes, likely today (Dec. 19, 2017).

Here’s an overview, and here’s a link to a more detailed version in a google presentation, with some screengrabs.

What’s changing?

• • Signup (registration) and Login pages
    • Appearance & URL changes
  • Private Messages
    • Previous messages are no longer available*
    • Appearance & URL changes
  • Profiles
    • Appearance & URL changes
    • Users will need to recreate some profile information
    • • • Profile Photo, etc.
      • Some items won’t immediately be available; we’ll look into adding them
        • Country Flags, Badges, Verified Account, etc.
      • Not affected: User’s history of topics & replies will still be available

      *Please PM me (‘developer’) if you need to retrieve critical info from previous PMs or Profiles; I may be able to do this on a case-by-case basis.

Working to make knife.wickededgeusa.com a great forum!

4 users thanked author for this post.

wickededge, Organic, Marc H, David

[developer (ChrisB)]

Yesterday at 3:10 pm MST we eliminated a wordpress plugin that had become very slow, and was causing page load errors and generally slow forum performance. While eliminating the plugin has caused some changes to the user experience (PMs, profiles) it looks like the right call to make the forum faster and more reliable. These charts show the before vs after from yesterday, with steep improvements across the board once the plugin was eliminated.

So, why did this plugin become such a problem for us? I’m not sure. I prefer to have a better answer than that, but it would take a lot of technical sleuthing to figure it out, and we wanted to put that effort into living better without that plugin, rather than trying to fix it. Apologies for a few weeks of intermittent performance issues. And we’re not stopping here, regarding improvements, we have additional big items we’ll be working on in January to make it even better.

Working to make knife.wickededgeusa.com a great forum!

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2 users thanked author for this post.

wickededge, Marc H

[developer (ChrisB)]

A couple of weeks ago we were experimenting with the @ symbol, and how it would trigger notifications to other forum members.

You can control this setting for your profile, here’s where to do it.

Working to make knife.wickededgeusa.com a great forum!

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1 user thanked author for this post.

Marc H

[developer (ChrisB)]

You may see a ‘Friend’ invite from me, in the forum. If you accept this invite, I can add you to a ‘Group’ that will enable an activity stream to easily see all Group members’ activities (Topics, Replies). I’ll try to automate this so all forum members join the Group, but for now I’m just manually inviting all recent users. If you’d like an invite, please reply here using @developer, or send me a PM.

Working to make knife.wickededgeusa.com a great forum!

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2 users thanked author for this post.

Mark76, Marc H

[Mark76]

Chris, are you making all of these adaptations yourself (with your helpers)? The only thing I’d be worried about is that if you make so many changes not backed by the WordPress community it could become difficult to maintain.

Oh, and what is stream activity?

Molecule Polishing: my blog about sharpening with the Wicked Edge

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