Forum menu
Not liking the fact P members are going to get ads as part of their subscription. I'd happily pay a little more rather than have ads. I may have to cancel my P revert to the that thing must not be mentioned, seeing as I'll be using it anyway.
Eh?
Subscribers get no ads.
Today we fixed a bug that you aren’t going to like.
As you know paying subscribers have ads disable on the site once they are logged in. Since we launched the new theme the filter that handles that has been disabling ads for most registered users too. Today we fixed that and registered users now will be seeing ads on the page.
Firstly let me reiterate how important they are. Ad revenue is a vital revenue stream for us and without it we would not exist. I can’t stress that enough.
However, what we are going to do is ad another layer of filtering to our ad system that will reduce the ads for registered users by around 20%. It’s going to take some time to implement as I have to completely rebuild the ad inventory to allow the filtering to work but over the coming days the number of ads on the page will reduce for registered users.
I may have mis read that as P users were getting 20% of ads on site
and its still painfully sloooow
I have to say its not usually slow for me. sometimes slows down but 90% of the time is fine
getting to threds you've commented in is now a very long winded process.
and only htanks to cooie do i know how to do it at all, lcickin on the # in my list of replies.
i don't understand why this should be more complicated than before
Bruneep, Premier users ARE subscribers. You are paying us money ergo subscribing.
Registered users are not subscribers. They’ve just registered a user name
There is the word ‘subscriber’ next to your name as a further clue.
Still very slow for me, also the old version of the forum used to have a function whereby if you rollover the time of post/freshness it would give you the last poster's name so you could see clearly who had replied, or rather, if it was you're own reply you're looking at.
Of course, off the shelf forum layouts have the thread starter under the thread title and the name of the latest user replying opposite but I guess that would limit advertising real estate or make it look too much like a normal forum and that would drive away people who don't want avatars...although most people appear to have been driven away anyway....
Its appalling tbh - why on earth do you insist on using what is one of the worst softwares out there as the backbone to the site?
Something like Invision Community is massively simpler to use, has hundreds of far better options, proper quoting, image insert, etc.
Makes this place looks like a 10yr old did it for their homework.
Actually - most 10yr olds would know how to do it better using one of the dedicated forum software packages rather than this hash up....
although most people appear to have been driven away anyway….
Based on what figures?
Interesting first post regensis I smell a disgruntled banned member.
Based on what figures?
Obviously I don't have the metrics. It's certainly my impression that things have slowed down a lot over the last month or so in terms of posts and new threads. Or is the forum slow down caused by heavy traffic? The days of seeing your new thread vanish off page 1 in an hour or less certainly seem to be long gone. Could be selective myopia on my part, am I wrong?
Thursday was the busiest day on the site since Bez’s Column in early January. 70k people on the site. The thing to bear in mind is that we aren’t just a forum. The content we publish gets a lot of views and that’s our commercial focus. We are a publishing company that ALSO hosts a free to use forum. That’s not to say the forum is not important to us and isn’t part of the bigger picture it certainly is
But I’ve been through this before. Several times on this thread. I am aware many use the site only for the forum and they would naturally wish we just developed a forum for them, but our commercial plan encompasses more more than just the forum.
The site is slow. This is due to our hosting company being unable to cope with our high traffic and load, which has increased a lot As previously stated, we are migrating to a new host. Google cloud as it happens. But to ensure uninterrupted service we are taking our time on this and it will be a few more weeks before we make the full transition.
why on earth do you insist on using what is one of the worst softwares out there as the backbone to the site?
I had a look into this after I'd visited STW. Irrespective of what hypothetical alternative I looked at, the first stage of the migration process always required first moving the latest version of BBpress. Even if STW was to use a different platform - which they aren't - this upgrade would have been a prerequisite.
most 10yr olds would know how to do it better
Before I had a better understanding of the site I thought I was an expert and knew better than the site owners as well.
Yay! New body font. Much more readable for blocks of copy.
Yup. We are listening to feedback
I preferred the previous font. 😬
I have a few minor frustrations, but they seem to be getting rectified one by one.
The new forum is looking good.
Font much better although I still struggle to read anything when it's written in blue. Change it back to black please so it's readable to us colour blind people.
New font is better, while it was being changed, I would've thought the inconsistencies in all the forum fonts could've been sorted?
It's just messy with so many different sizes of typeface. I know it's not crucial, but I certainly wouldn't be happy unleashing something so ugly on the public 😀
Here's what I see, massive headers, tiny main page font, big (much nicer) thread font, blues/blacks -
I clicked "bringing back trousers to trouser town".Ads that look interesting beat ads that drive me nuts. Pace Service Center and suttonbank bikes good too.
22 seconds to open a page using macbook os x el capitan safari and over 25 seconds using iPad mini safari.
between 3 nd 5 seconds to open threads for me. desktop win 7 firefox
It's shit, slow and not very user friendly
As well as cancelling my sub recently I had been slowly drifting away from STW, slow with news, too many preachy opinion type articles , FGF full of dodgy pics of blokes modelling clothes that were just embarrassing to scroll through at your work desk on a Friday lunchtime, Facebook page that keeps dragging up articles from months ago, the only reason I still drifted over to the 'main' site was when I was browsing the forum. Now that's been made so unfriendly to use I can't see myself spending much time here at all, by the time it's no doubt sorted and running faster I, along with a few others I suspect, will be gone
just checking in, still shit. see yous in another fortnight.
Font is better, thanks.
Still slow. Looking at the network traffic in the Firefox diagnostic tools thing, while I'm not an expert, it feels like there's a lot of flab in there.
"Forum replies created" appears to be somewhat broken.
New font is fine (but didn't dislike the old one 🙂 ). The forum main page font isn't eye-friendly at all in light blue and it's too small IMO, but it's growing into a really smart looking site.
But goddamn it put a freshness/time stamp on the mobile version one day! Please!
If I go to "Profile->Forums->Replies Created, then I can see the post above, and a post from a my question about 42t cassettes, which has been intermingled, like some kind of chimera, with another post I made. And then the post I made to the thread about Sherpas seems to have vanished.
(Oh, and adding links, why is that so hateful now?)
Thanks for listening on the font - Open Sans is much better (though I think I still prefer Verdana, so switching back to that having turned it off to have a look 😉 )
Lots of good things recently… getting better every week. Priorities being content, rather than forum, seems the right way around to me. Glad the forum is also receiving some love though.
Is fixing post editing on iPhones on the list of things to look at? If a post contains an URL, long string, or reasonable sized picture, you still can't really edit it.
A slight retrograde: when you hover over the menu at the top of the page, the sub-items have text but no images. This is on Chrome 63 on Mac OS-X
Thursday was the busiest day on the site since Bez’s Column in early January. 70k people on the site. The thing to bear in mind is that we aren’t just a forum. The content we publish gets a lot of views and that’s our commercial focus. We are a publishing company
<span style="font-size: 0.8rem;"> that ALSO hosts a free to use forum. That’s not to say the forum is not important to us and isn’t part of the bigger picture it certainly is</span>
Hiya.
Could you give us a clue as to what the 'bigger picture' is?
Love the mag,it's evolved and seems to be back to it's best. Excellent writing and content, spot on.
I can't use the forum . Too many issues to mention. It's much harder and less pleasant to use than it was.I understand why and I'm sure it will get fixed at some point.
I don't want to use Facebook or any other platform to access STW content. I read the magazine. I then usually read it again in a slightly different form on the website.
Pushing the same content to me on Facebook or any other platform is pointless. I've read it. Much of it twice.
Please don't make content platform specific. Exclusive Facebook content won't make me join Facebook. it will just make me less likely to visit this site.
Why is the forum now loading in one font then changing to a different one? That's with all of Firefox, Chrome and Edge on Win 10.
Facebook for 'exclusive'* content is a dead end for me, I won't use it to look at content. Plus it is unpopular with the youngsters.
*Hardly ever is exclusive, PinkBike, BikeRadar or elsewhere have normally posted it first.
Load times are my main bugbear at the mo. In fact it’s the only site I use at present that occasionally demands I restart Chrome (iOS 11) in order to inject some pace. Not guaranteed to work either and is the reason I often leave the site or bail from submitting a post.
The migration to GC can’t come soon enough IMO.
Why is the forum now loading in one font then changing to a different one?
I see that too, especially on ipad. Weird.
I see the font change on Chrome on Mac, seems like an instance of what's known as FOUC - Flash of Unstyled Content.
Just noticed it myself; forum loading in one font then switching to another.
Surely there has to come a point when you realise you're trying to massage a bag of smashed crabs and you just need to throw in the towel?
Wind back the arrogance, admit your mistakes, sort the problems.
It's not me that is coupled to the sinking ship...
Re the "retrograde step" I noted earlier. Please ignore, fault at my end.
Why is the forum now loading in one font then changing to a different one?
Fonts are loaded from Google's CDN. Until they load the browsers makes a best guess about what to use. Once the font file has loaded all test is redrawn with the correct font. If you want consistent fonts across browsers this is one of the downsides.
why is the font so tiny on overview compared to the side text?
I'm not sure I've seen this specific thing mentioned, but it's related to a common issue which we have covered. I was just logged out in the middle of editing a post - if I wasn't fairly IT savvy I could easily have lost a lot of my typing which would have been pretty irritating. I initially just checked the post age to see if I'd gone past some timer, but it was only 7 minutes.
I don't particularly have a problem with being logged out excessively - I presume it was just the standard 2 week logout, and I don't suppose this is a new issue though it's not one I've seen before. I've already given my explanation above why any logout is daft, but being logged out in the middle of editing a post you've just made is particularly daft. If you really have to regularly log people out then you should at minimum have an activity timer and only log people out when they're inactive.
Though as a dev and having some idea of the complexity of issues like this, I know what I'd be doing given a choice between implementing an activity timer and removing the auto-logout...
Unable to expand text to make it easier to read on iPad, screen forced to re-render to original size imcluding all the stuff down the right I don’t want to see.
Painfully slow, possibly even more painful than that. Certainly slower. There's a possibility I'll lose the will to live while waiting for this to submit. In which case, thank you, it's been emotional.
ipad 4th gen iOS 10.3.3 Safari...
Forget my post above, have had same rendering problem on other websites
Is it only me that gets black text on the main forum page when in portrait on my tablet and blue text when in landscape?
Painfully slow
See the "our forum" sticky. The host can't cope, STW is looking to relocate.
Is it only me that gets black text on the main forum page when in portrait on my tablet and blue text when in landscape?
Desktop vs mobile sites?
Is there any progress being made on making a usable search function? fixing the search results on Google. ?
If you are listening to feedback then, this forum software is the most unintuitive, least user friendly load of cack ive ever had the misfortune to ',use,