Is the blue colour staying or is that getting changed? I struggle to read what it says at times
I'm struggling with the blue as well. The site has lost much of its previous minimalist clarity for me. The weak blue and random mix of black, grey and blue is part of that.
So aside from the forum looking rubbish and not working, lets see if this reply actually posts within what should be an acceptable timeframe (the forum I created myself for my own short lived website 20 years ago posted replies inside a second) and/or is visible straight away...
Did all 5 visitors enjoy it?
You're very condescending. Let's face it here, we all use other forums. I have over 100,000 posts in the last 20+ years on forums and without fail, every single forum shows posts instantly, you click through button and 1s later the post is there, every time, every forum.
This is not a foible, quirk, glitch or anomaly on this place, this is 100% how a forum should not be considered 'working'
Whether 'we' as customers are considered to be paying for a forum, or a magazine doesn't really concern me, the forum is a part of it.
Since the new forum this place has gone from quirky to absolutely unusable. I can see it, many other a can see it. I can't see how you can defend it.
The argument about losing advertising or sponsorship etc is all well and good, but currently this place is losing its core clients.
At risk of a pile on, the new format appears incredibly cluttered. Using an iPad, when I click forum, all I can see on the landing page is the first two threads, equivalent to about an inch of horizontal screen. Is it not possible to refine the spacing or something, as it looks dreadful on the eye.
So aside from the forum looking rubbish and not working, lets see if this reply actually posts within what should be an acceptable timeframe (the forum I created myself for my own short lived website 20 years ago posted replies inside a second) and/or is visible straight away...
Did all 5 visitors enjoy it?
You're very condescending. Let's face it here, we all use other forums. I have over 100,000 posts in the last 20+ years on forums and without fail, every single forum shows posts instantly, you click through button and 1s later the post is there, every time, every forum.
This is not a foible, quirk, glitch or anomaly on this place, this is 100% how a forum should not be considered 'working'
Whether 'we' as customers are considered to be paying for a forum, or a magazine doesn't really concern me, the forum is a part of it.
Since the new forum this place has gone from quirky to absolutely unusable. I can see it, many other a can see it. I can't see how you can defend it.
The argument about losing advertising or sponsorship etc is all well and good, but currently this place is losing its core clients.
For information, that took 40 minutes. It takes less time to send a message from Mars.
Agree about the clutter. Loads of extra info that in no way helps with reading or navigation. Doubly annoying as useful information is not shown and navigation links missing. Do we really need the word 'forum' written twice between every post? Funnily enough I know it's a forum 🙂
Is anyone at stw towers actually using the forum regularly on a mobile device?
There seemed to be some good developments in the first week and the forum was heading in the right direction after the initial launch. Not so much recently. Still happy to see how things settle, I just hope there are more design tweaks coming and this isn't it.
All this has been explained many time weeksy and they are working on it the best they can, the other option as mentioned was to close the forum altogether for unknown time period at great expense. Comparing a knocked up website for a little hobby is very condescending to a business that employs staff and provides 1000s of customers. There is no comparison.
How many clients have they lost?
FYI that instantly.
I'm willing to put up with a lot in the name of progress, but now I can't get rid of the Issue 159 ad at the bottom of the Latest Posts view and that's just a step too bloody far! ☹️
The other option was to plan the upgrade so it had as little disruption as possible and/or had a relatively easy roll back strategy.
I understand you might be constrained on resources (to plan/test a good strategy, then to execute it)
But at the moment from the outside looking in it looks like this is just slapped straight into production with crossed fingers, little analysis of risk, planning, testing or rollback option, and hope it works.
Now, STW absolutely does not owe me anything. I've got a huge amount out of the mag and the forum over the past 20+ years I've been on here.
I don't want to be part of a pile on. Personally, I am happy to wait however long for it to be fixed, no biggie. but I am also really, really concerned that others won't be so patient and it'll ruin the community on here for good.
This needs to be learned from for the future. I just hope you get it fixed soon.
I hope you understand I'm saying this constructively and out of love for this place, rather than malice.
You're very condescending.
That's as may be. But he's correct. You're comparing a student newsletter with the New York Times.
There are 17 pages and counting on this thread, a significant proportion of which is posts from Mark going "we know it's slow and we're working on it." This wasn't news before the migration even started. There's an update on this page.
Define 'faster' 😉
But yeah pages load quicker, that's certainly true.
Edit to add @Cougar sorry I agree with weeksy here. It could be more delicately put, but factually, a foundational bit of forum functionality (returning posts quickly) has been borked for several days.
Feedback needs to be listened to, not dismissed because it's difficult to hear. IMO.
I'm getting delays of hours not minutes.
Weirdly if I subscribe to a topic I will get an email immediately if someone replies... but if I come to the forum there's nothing showing. If I reply to that pending post it still appears in the correct order.
Testing from NZ. 0609 UK time I think. My posts have not been showing until Mark hits the magic button
Showing g I replied but no post visible
My post on the electric shifting thread appeared instantly. The ones on here still not after 12 mins
All this has been explained many time weeksy and they are working on it the best they can, the other option as mentioned was to close the forum altogether for unknown time period at great expense. Comparing a knocked up website for a little hobby is very condescending to a business that employs staff and provides 1000s of customers. There is no comparison.
How many clients have they lost?
I'm not denying they're working on it. But that doesn't make it less broken and doesn't mean people can just start being condescending to someone who points out they're unhappy with it. Somewhere like my own forum may be small-fry compared to here yes with only 400,000 posts, but mtbr.com has 16m posts and as i say, like all other forums, posts are instant.
As to how many customers have been lost... Only Mark and STW will know the answer in the future, you/I can see that the post counts have dropped massively in the last few weeks since the migration/issues. So have the Articles etc. I don't know how many will return, but as this place is seemingly on a knife-edge, it won't take that many to not return for it to be a problem.
I'm not sitting here saying Mark or Anthony are doing a bad job, they're trying to fix a problem, we get that. However, having people come in with an attitude of "shut up and put up with it" is simply wrong, which is more what i was pointing out. As forum members and people who put our hands in our pockets every year, we've got every right to say "nah, this isn't working well at all". IMO.
I’ve just been taken to some weird ‘Humix’ (or Humex?) version of the STW front page wtf? AND it wouldn’t log me in! I tried again and here I am, back in the room. Odd.
Probably me hitting the delete cache button manually.
Could you add a Delete Cache button to the website temporarily so we can trigger it ourselves (although I'm not sure we're to be trusted) or perhaps temporarily code it so that Delete Cache is called after each post submission?
@weeksy, sure, you have a right to moan. But what really puzzles me is what you think your moaning will achieve? It doesn't help solve the problem, it doesn't tell anyone anything they don't already know, and it contributes to the already negative atmosphere. I would respectfully suggest that you give it a rest.
@weeksy, sure, you have a right to moan. But what really puzzles me is what you think your moaning will achieve? It doesn't help solve the problem, it doesn't tell anyone anything they don't already know, and it contributes to the already negative atmosphere. I would respectfully suggest that you give it a rest.
Give it a rest ? WTF, i've posted twice. That's it... There's people posting 10x that and i'm the one who's being negative here lol. I'm not moaning, i'm stating a fact that's it... ]
If we can only post things that they know then why the heck are any of us posting anything.
However, having people come in with an attitude of "shut up and put up with it" is simply wrong, which is more what i was pointing out. As forum members and people who put our hands in our pockets every year, we've got every right to say "nah, this isn't working well at all". IMO.
No one has done that, no one has claimed it’s fully working. Comparing this site to one someone setup as fun 20 years ago isn’t comparative, that was my point.
So aside from the forum looking rubbish and not working, lets see if this reply actually posts within what should be an acceptable timeframe (the forum I created myself for my own short lived website 20 years ago posted replies inside a second) and/or is visible straight away...
Did all 5 visitors enjoy it?
I think so. Because you typed something, hit send and it immediately published the content to the DB and refreshed the page to include it. It was instant. That was 20 years ago and yes, it obviously wasn't at this scale but the mechanics are the same - all this talk of years worth of updates in the background etc shouldn't slow down the ability to type a few lines of text, press send and for it to appear instantly - see Pistonheads which I think is probably scales of magnitude way over STW and they manage it. We can joke about hamsters etc but this is an absolute shambles. I can't quite believe it managed to get out into the wild in this state.
Lets see how long this message takes to post (my post yesterday was +6 minutes).
However, having people come in with an attitude of "shut up and put up with it" is simply wrong, which is more what i was pointing out. As forum members and people who put our hands in our pockets every year, we've got every right to say "nah, this isn't working well at all". IMO.
No one has done that, no one has claimed it’s fully working. Comparing this site to one someone setup as fun 20 years ago isn’t comparative, that was my point.
At no point has anyone mentioned the scale of the website I setup 20 years ago. Assumptions are well, you know.
What I was more getting at is that regardless of the scale, 20 years of progression has led us here - a forum with loads of traffic thats seemingly underpinned by actual hamsters, wishful thinking and from the outside looking in, a platform that you've either outgrown or don't know how to manage. I'm all for forward fixing after an implementation but there has to be a point at which you give in and fall back and given that 20 years ago, regardless of scale of a site whether it was something I created myself, STW of the time, Pistonheads or the MBUK forum, a user was able to type something and it'd appear instantly.
Wow^ posted instantly 😀
You might want to redirect www.singletrack.com/forum to the forum front page itself. It currently goes to a mostly empty page and the user has to click the forum tab on that to get to the actual forum page. Wouldn't be surprised if quite a few users have the old link as their route into the forum via browser shortcut and just assume it's down when that page doesn't load properly.
Tuesday Update;
Still battling with page cache and waiting for VIP support to step in and help.
For the tech minded here's a bit of detail on the issue.
Wordpress by default does not cache pages for logged in users. This is to allow for all the dynamic content to load instantly and for pages to update properly right after you post replies etc.
But forums are very heavy users of databases and so some form of caching needs to operate. Standard caching is a bit of a blunt intrument when it comes to the fine detail required of forums and that's why forums like this one (WPforo) have their own specific caching systems. This means we are running two caching systems for the site. VIP cache for the main site and WPForo cache for the forum. They are set, as far as we can all see, to not step on each other's toes. VIP cache is off completely for logged in users so all that should affect you when posting is the WPForo cache. But that's not working correctly as we all can see.
The baffling thing right now is that everything works fine on our preproduction (preprod) site.
Explanation: We have 3 versions of the site all running seperately. We have our sandbox site, preprod and live.
Sandbox is where we try stuff out and break things. Preprod is where we test things just before we put them live. Preprod is a literal copy of the live site. And infact yesterday we updated our preprod site from the live site to be absolutely sure that preprod and live were set up exactly the same. On preprod everything works fine. On live it doesn't. This is the problem and why we are involving tech support from Wordpress VIP (who are our website hosts).
Another line of attack we are working on in parallel is to set up our own specific forum cache rules using the cache tools we have on our server with the intention of replacing the built in forum cache system completely.
So, on we go with that.
Today it's just Anthony and me. Andy joins us tomorrow.
Thanks as ever for you patience.
And if anyone is passing by the Lloyds bank offices in London today, could you give them a middle finger as you walk by on my behalf.
Cheers
Mark
around a 15 minute delay on posts on other threads for me today - seems to be going in the right direction at least, hope you get it sorted soon team, must be creating havoc for you, and your business.
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
I'm not moaning, i'm stating a fact that's it...
Thank the gods for that, we'd never have noticed an issue otherwise, what with it only being mentioned about a hundred times already, up to and including Mark saying several times over before work even started that it would take time to sort out.
Seriously dude, come on. WTF do you expect? They're in the middle of a massive migration of tens of millions of posts going back 15+ years, they've got a full-time and a part time developer and this is extraordinary work with a brand new system that they're having to learn, and whilst all this is going on they still have a day job to do in order to keep the lights on.
a platform that you've either outgrown or don't know how to manage.
A platform which has recently been moved to new hardware and is currently being migrated to new software. 🤷♂️
Don’t want to curse it but seems a little slicker this am.
A very inconsistent posting delay for me! I posted on two threads in quick succession in the Chat forum. One of them appeared immediately, and was followed up with replies from others pretty quickly. The other, posted perhaps a minute later, still hasn't shown up 15 mins later. Very odd.
Anyway, keep up the good work Mark & team
And if anyone is passing by the Lloyds bank offices in London today, could you give them a middle finger as you walk by on my behalf.
I've visited Lloyds of London. We did a tour back when I was in high school. It is a deeply odd building.
Lloyds of London is not Lloyds Bank
One is esoteric insurance the other is mostly consumer banking with a bit of pensions thrown in
After a couple of days away I'm Just testing to see what if any delay there is. Hitting 'add reply' at 11:58
After a couple of days away I'm Just testing to see what if any delay there is. Hitting 'add reply' at 11:58
That took 16 minutes to appear.
I know that adverts are an important revenue stream for you, but on the mobile site I'm seeing 5 large adverts (often more than one of the same) before you get to the first forum post. Not so on the desktop site.
Lloyds of London is the only customer I have where I will definitely go suited & booted. The top-hatted doormen will not let you in unless you are appropriately attired and keep a stash of ties behind the front desk for those not in compliance.
Lloyds bank are (or were) over the water possibly where the shard now is, but I think are now in the Gherkin.
Forum is running a whole load better Mark.
Off topic, I’m based from Lloyds and security has been ramped up due to the threat from protest groups. We are advised not to wear lanyards etc on display and keep a low profile. The toilets in there are also weird, apparently based on submarine toilets.
Seems to be faster to me
Oops try again
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Definitely as fast as a forum 20 years ago for me, including this very forum. Hopefully that’s one major issue gone.
