We need to perform some maintenance on our wordpress backend. When we do this, the “best case” scenario is that users won’t even notice most of the changes. However, it’s more likely that a couple of things will “break” temporarily, and we’ll need to fix them.
I’ll post an update here after the maintenance changes have been made, and then we can use this thread for you to report anything that’s not working correctly.
Thanks!
There are some remaining tweaks we’ll make to some appearance items, but the maintenance and upgrades are now complete.
I find it different in this reverse orientation of the Forum. That I can get used to that over time. I would prefer though the post’s author’s name be in “black” and their forum affiliation or position be in “blue” The blue is harder to catch my eye than the black.
Chris in the “Recent Topic” view everything is on the right but pretty much the same. I would prefer screen name in black, and to have everything on the left for consistency and ease of use, in all the screen views.
In the thread view for the specific topic, the blued box all-the-way at the top stating the last participant to the tread is really of little value, IMO. It just references the participant and you still have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the thread to see how the participant participated. Also there is the double line redundancy of the icons??
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?..
So, I try and click on links to other pages… like from that post I created yesterday, and I get this…
… just me?
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 will make us do a couple of things differently, like private messages, but overall should significantly improve speed and stability for the forum.
Ok… been that way since the upgrade… it’s never loaded. (I’ve tried many times).
Also, I click on any users name to see their profile… it says… Page Not Found.
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.
So… it worked… but I couldn’t log in… it just said userpro=login or something like that.
Now I can login… but the page once again doesn’t load.
link in forum not loading…get page error after long wait @7PM EST
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.
Here everything works fine now, with the exception that PM’s are not available.
I also noted in the accounts section that my postal code is not correct anymore. (I do have a rather oddly formatted postal code, because it’s Dutch.) Has there been some kind of conversion that did no go well 100%? And when I view my address, the postal code is shown after the country name instead of before or after the name of the city I live in.
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 so it’s probably easiest just to move ahead with that plan, than to try and repair it. We do have backups of the site, prior to the updates, that we could revert to, it’s just more work to go that route than to put the effort into more permanent fixes for the forum, in my opinion, although I’m always open to suggestions.
Hey Chris, as of late I have found the Forum to be moving considerably slower then normal. It seems it takes a much longer time to submit or post a response or to navigate to a link embedded in a thread. The PM function is missed, of course. I’m sure what ever you do to move us on is better than where we’re at now. Thanks for your care and effort.
Avatars can be added now!
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.
View profile sometimes looks good. Sometimes I get an error message "
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 pages.
In the menu, you may notice that we eliminated the link that used to be there for ‘My Private Messages.’ This is because the PMs now live on your profile page, and it’s not possible to provide a separate link straight to PMs.
For the old PMs, meaning their content, those aren’t available through the new PM service. If you have important content you need to retrieve from the old PMs, please let me know and I’ll work on it; I’ll try to retrieve it from a backup copy of the forum that’s running on a private server.
Do you guys have problem when uploading picture?
