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Thanks for the nice note! I was laying in bed one night a month ago wondering how I could convey the need and importance of such a huge move. I was trying to think of a case where a family made a huge decision that wasn't easy, that had pros and cons. A "house move" came to mind and it was a perfect fit!
We're a family, outgrew out house, had to make a hard decision on where to live, will have to endure a move (never fun or easy), will have to deal with some trade-offs, etc. The hope and expectation is that the overall move will be best for our family in the short and long term... and we really think it will be!
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Yup, the new page editor will be much easier to use AND have a lot more features, like the ability to add individual people to help you edit if you'd like. We'll try to put together some better tutorials and post them!
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Nope, Flash will not be required to use the new site!
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You could always hit "Mark all topics read". I hope this feature stays...I use it often.
Yes, we'll still have "mark all topics read" and "mark topics in this forum as read". We'll also have WAY better "subscription" controls.
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The platform: We looked very closely at vB and xF and I personally interact daily with a lot of large forum owners that are on those, and other, forum platforms. At the end of the day we decided to go with a company called Huddler that built not only provides the software, but also does the hosting. This makes it easier for me to manage because in the past I had to deal with programmers that said the hardware guys were the problem, the hardware guys said the DBA's were not doing their job at optimizing the database, and the DBA's said the programmers needed to fix their code. Having one company who is responsible for all those items provides a ton more accountability and "the buck stops here" management for me.
"thumbs-up" or "reputation" is something we've thought a lot about. We will have the option to display member's reputation... but we're not convinced it will be useful and don't want it to be gamed / or turn into a popularity contest.
Alerts on reputation or quotes would be interesting. What if you got an alert if someone posted your photo in another thread? Lots of cool things you could do and we're definitely trying to think of them. We will have the ability to get alerts on updates to member's pages and comments to other's pages and comments on our own... which is cool!
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Unfortunately for some, the site will take more bandwidth, a bit more processing power, and will render a little slower. This isn't a result of just the ads, but all the stuff that is packed into the platform to make it more robust. This was another one of those HUGE decision points for our team... and one we didn't take lightly. A few items:
1) Turning off ads will definitely help on many fronts. You can become a GFM (buying one or winning / earning one) and then be able to browse BYC ad-free
2) Future developments: Performance and efficient use of bandwidth are high priorities and we've been making improvements to these items. We're working on a big project to add mobile support, and we may be able to leverage the mobile site for people to use on their computers to browse the site with fewer features, but less bandwidth. To be clear, I'm not sure we'll be able to do this with the mobile version, but it is something we're exploring.
