Doug Thompson

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…[Read more]

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.

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…[Read more]

Hi Mark,

For your profile, if you see the [userpro template…, then you’ve navigated to the old (as of yesterday) profile page. UserPro is the plugin we eliminated yesterday, and we’re working to make sure we don’t link to those old pages anymore. If you had bookmarked any of those pages in your browser, please update those bookmarks to the new…[Read more]

Hi Marc, I received your message, thanks! Also, the old PMs aren’t available, as they “lived” in the old PM plugin through userpro. If there are important PMs you need to recover, let me know, and we’ll work on it through an older backup site.

We’ve made the change to the forums now (to eliminate the plugin that was causing performance problems) and there are a couple of additional cleanup items we’ll need to do. For example, the ‘My Private Messages’ link in the Forum menu (upper right) no longer works.

But Private messages are back, and I’m hopeful that they’ll work even better.

Mark76 – Thanks for the note. Yes, something didn’t go well when we updated a couple of our wordpress plugins to the newest version. For PMs, the indexing seemed to get messed up, where user profiles and PMs weren’t appearing correctly. This all seems to have come from an issue with the UserPro plugin that we were already planning to abandon, and…[Read more]

We’re working now, to undo some of the areas of the forum that rely on the userpro plugin. Once that’s done, we’ll remove it, and from our testing, it looks like that will fix the errors and slow page loads.

Here’s an overview of what will be affected, although most of the changes are pretty subtle.

• Registration (new user signup) and login…

[Read more]

cbwx34 I’m going to temporarily disable something in 1 minute, if you’re available, to see if that allows the page to load for you. Please let me know if that timing works for you.

For everyone who reads this, it’ll temporarily make some things look funky.

This is a symptom of the performance problems we’ve been seeing, unfortunately. So, it’s hit-or-miss that we’ll sometimes run into page load errors; at times, the servers are too bogged down to respond fast enough, leading to that error page.

Apologies for the problems, and it’s why I have a sense of urgency about making a couple of changes that…[Read more]

It’s looking like our best option is to move to a different PM service within WordPress.

• IF… we can’t import your history of PMs into the new service, how much of a problem is this?
  • Please note that you may have some or all of your previous PMs as email notifications.
• Why do this?
  • To achieve faster page loads, by ditching the…

[Read more]

For a bit more background on the maintenance changes: We’ve continued to see slow performance / slow page loads on the forum. And it’s looking like one of the plugins we’ve used heavily is the culprit (UserPRO), as well as being the culprit for sub-par Private Messaging.

What does this mean?…

• In the near-term (next several days) we’ll be…

[Read more]

There are some remaining tweaks we’ll make to some appearance items, but the maintenance and upgrades are now complete.

I’ll investigate, and see exactly how it works; then I’ll post an explanation. I don’t like it when things are inconsistent, as this seems to be, so far…

I received an email – that’s a cool feature.

Thanks Marc, I think we’ll need to ask Eric F if he’s publicly posted that reply yet.

Marc, because you’re a moderator, you may have received a notification about a draft post that hasn’t yet been published. If it’s not that, as the cause, I’ll keep looking. But I checked to make sure it’s not in spam, and we’re good there.