Down time

[adz]

Apologies for the brief downtime - and on game day!

I'm working on a test site for a new ccmfans.net, and making a copy of the database doubled the disk usage so put us over capacity for the server. Who woulda thunk it hey.

 

[Hello Sailor]

Hi Adz,
I'm only interested in the mens team and info relating to it. I find it irritating when I think there is a reference to the mens team and click on it to find its for the women. Is is possible to have threads related to the ALW bundled into a separate forum? ie in the home page where you select
"Central Coast Mariners FC" perhaps an option for dedicated ALM and ALW sub-forums.
Before any allegations of misogyny are made, I'm similarly uninterested in the youth/academy news.

 

[Archie]

Hi Adz,
I'm only interested in the mens team and info relating to it. I find it irritating when I think there is a reference to the mens team and click on it to find its for the women. Is is possible to have threads related to the ALW bundled into a separate forum? ie in the home page where you select
"Central Coast Mariners FC" perhaps an option for dedicated ALM and ALW sub-forums.
Before any allegations of misogyny are made, I'm similarly uninterested in the youth/academy news.

Most of the time now a thread either says ALM or ALW next to it which should keep it clear.

 

[adz]

Hi Adz,
I'm only interested in the mens team and info relating to it. I find it irritating when I think there is a reference to the mens team and click on it to find its for the women. Is is possible to have threads related to the ALW bundled into a separate forum? ie in the home page where you select
"Central Coast Mariners FC" perhaps an option for dedicated ALM and ALW sub-forums.
Before any allegations of misogyny are made, I'm similarly uninterested in the youth/academy news.

Mostly the threads are labelled ALM or ALW specific, as @Archie said, but sometimes people might accidentally post a link in the wrong one

 

[Hello Sailor]

Most of the time now a thread either says ALM or ALW next to it which should keep it clear.

Yeah I know, but I accidentally click on the wrong one sometimes. If the forums are split then you get only what you want and as it looks like ADZ is working on the database I figured now is a good time to mention it.

 

[adz]

Yep always open to suggestions for improvements!

There will be a bit of a restructure on how the forum is presented on the new platform as far as the sections go. Just looking at how it's used at the moment with the majority of stuff in "Central Coast Mariners FC" as thats where most people go - hoping to show that there are other things. And then make things like ALW and ALM (etc) clearer.

I'll post a link to the test server soon and you can see what I mean.

 

[adz]

Sneak peak - just chucking it down here because not many people scroll down this far. It's a very early version - still working out kinks of importing and converting almost 400k posts and the associated data. It's running on a tiny server that may shit itself if a couple of people start clicking through it, so don't be surprised if it crashes. It's in read only mode (hopefully) and posts are being synced from here every minute.

https://test.ccmfans.net/

 

[FFC Mariner]

Unread posts button.?.liked the layout

 

[adz]

Unread posts button.?.liked the layout

It's a pretty basic platform so quite a few things that are included in other forums are either add-ons or you need to build them. Unread posts might be one of those. I'll be after feedback like this so we know what needs to be added.

 

[adz]

All threads go through the home page so anything with new posts in it will go to the top there

 

[Big Al]

Sneak peak - just chucking it down here because not many people scroll down this far. It's a very early version - still working out kinks of importing and converting almost 400k posts and the associated data. It's running on a tiny server that may shit itself if a couple of people start clicking through it, so don't be surprised if it crashes. It's in read only mode (hopefully) and posts are being synced from here every minute.

https://test.ccmfans.net/

No pages just one big thread?

Is it possible to have a header to know what thread you’re in that stays in the page like excel freeze panes. Looks like the arrow is the only way out.

Like in here your alerts mail box and the menu are at the top. But also keep the thread title.

Can see maybe everything just ending in one thread and stuff getting lost

 

[adz]

No pages just one big thread?

Is it possible to have a header to know what thread you’re in that stays in the page like excel freeze panes. Looks like the arrow is the only way out.

Like in here your alerts mail box and the menu are at the top. But also keep the thread title.

Can see maybe everything just ending in one thread and stuff getting lost

Good feedback, thanks! Everything is in threads still, they are just all shown as a feed on the home page.
This way all new posts can be seen in one place instead of having to click into the specific sections like "Central Coast Mariners FC" or "Central Coast Football" etc. At the moment pretty much everyone just goes straight to Central Coast Mariners FC.





You can filter to only the section you're after too




These are 'tags' in the new platform. They allow us to put multiple tags on a thread, making it easier to find and organise discussions by more than one topic, so you can see all related conversations at a glance, no matter which section they'd traditionally belong in. So we could have posts tagged as CCM and specific players, teams, coaches, or whatever.

They should be a bit clearer when we update the colours to be different, maybe add icons.

 

[Ironbark]

I'm pretty big on the 'What's new' button - but the new set up doesn't need one.
Personally I'll like sitting in the All Discussions section with Latest selected which is essentially the exact same outcome.

I like the aesthetics, it will flow well to read too

 

[adz]

Good feedback guys, I'll start a list of "shit to do" with some of these on it.

Very early days so far and one of the reasons for the new platform is being able to develop new features but I'll get into that more later. Getting the link here was to get a bit of early feedback from the keen beans that actually read this bit

 

[Big Al]

Good feedback, thanks! Everything is in threads still, they are just all shown as a feed on the home page.
This way all new posts can be seen in one place instead of having to click into the specific sections like "Central Coast Mariners FC" or "Central Coast Football" etc. At the moment pretty much everyone just goes straight to Central Coast Mariners FC.

View attachment 3053

View attachment 3054

You can filter to only the section you're after too

View attachment 3055


These are 'tags' in the new platform. They allow us to put multiple tags on a thread, making it easier to find and organise discussions by more than one topic, so you can see all related conversations at a glance, no matter which section they'd traditionally belong in. So we could have posts tagged as CCM and specific players, teams, coaches, or whatever.

They should be a bit clearer when we update the colours to be different, maybe add icons.

Was more talking about once you are in the thread it self (sorry should have been clearer). Looks like the e.g game day vs bogan FC once you are in it and scrolling through the messages you are then in one big page and after a few might not know where you see or how to get out.

Currently on the platform i see the dark bold to show there are new posts in the thread (i have new posts last so everything is order). Lets say Ive missed two days and the contract law talk started. I read everyone first to see what I might say hasn’t been said but I might in my mind think page 10 Adz. Said Newcastle are shit and I won’t to come back after catching up and reply dam straight and I roughly know what page to find it. With the hole big thread it might be harder to find or i just answer before reading the others.

Only minor and i hate website changes just because i like what i am used to and then eventually work things out and don’t mind. That’s just me be painful ?.

Setout etc looks good and as you say adding colour and banners etc will make it look better and easier

Great job as always and appreciate the efforts

 

[adz]

Was more talking about once you are in the thread it self (sorry should have been clearer). Looks like the e.g game day vs bogan FC once you are in it and scrolling through the messages you are then in one big page and after a few might not know where you see or how to get out.

Got it - made a note of this one. Thread title should be easy enough "pinned" at the top. The other issue about getting out, will need to work on.

might be harder to find or i just answer before reading the others

Yeah this is an interesting one and will be a very different way of scrolling through posts! Will just have to see how we go and if we need to put new features in to help out. I was hoping that it would make it easier to get through a thread, but could go the other way.

i hate website changes just because i like what i am used

Yeah you won't be the only one there! ? If everyone hates it then there's no reason to proceed. Hopefully we can work it out though.

 

[Ironbark]

You get used to change like this very quickly though

 

[Big Al]

Got it - made a note of this one. Thread title should be easy enough "pinned" at the top. The other issue about getting out, will need to work on.


Yeah this is an interesting one and will be a very different way of scrolling through posts! Will just have to see how we go and if we need to put new features in to help out. I was hoping that it would make it easier to get through a thread, but could go the other way.


Yeah you won't be the only one there! ? If everyone hates it then there's no reason to proceed. Hopefully we can work it out though.

Thanks mate and hope you’re not sorry you asked ?

 

[adz]

The last couple of weeks have mainly been on automating infrastructure and monitoring setup, and keeping the posts in sync. I didn't want to spend too much time syncing posts but there were a couple of issues, especially around posts being moved or deleted, due to how xenforo stores them without much info on what has changed and when, and how flarum processes them in a way that is fine for making a single post but takes a looooong time to bring across even a thousand at a time (about 30 - 45 seconds per thousand).

I think it's fairly stable now but there may be a bit of weirdness if a thread gets deleted or moved around still.

The test site has been turned on again, it now has a kill switch just in case it goes a bit nuts ?

Moving on, there is a bit of data cleanup to do and these items

• Clean username on login - xenforo lets you put spaces and whatever characters in your name and flarum doesn't. I have a cleanup function in the data converter, so need to enable that as you log in so a few people can log in with their existing username
• Import avatars
• Before avatars, all files are being written to the server hard drive - these files have to be moved out (to S3) so that we can kill servers and bring new ones up when necessary
• Profanity filter - there is none at the moment and we might have to make it a bit stricter, not sure what the impact of all the swearing is on SEO and that sort of stuff
• More... first step is to bring the new site up to about the same as this one functionality-wise, without stuff that we don't need, and then move on to new features

So that's a bit of a progress report in case anyone was interested. I will make a new thread when it's a bit more stable but this is for the few people that read down into this section, and a post about "Down time". Apologies for the tech talk - xenforo is the current platform, flarum is the new one.

 

[FFC Mariner]

Thanks Adz.