HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT - BYC SOFTWARE CONVERSION Tuesday 1/10/2012

[Judy]

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I don't think there's a way to turn this off for a thread, just as we can't make the chick go away now, without opening the thread. But you'll find the alert is much less obtrusive, more like a darker grey as opposed to a lighter one, rather than a bright yellow chick.

And, like so many things with this new platform, there are tradeoffs. When you click on the alert, you go directly to the first post you haven't read. Or you can choose the last or first post in a thread by clicking on the first part of it. Or if you "mouse over," it lets you see more of the post without clicking. If you've been in the thread before, it tells you how many posts you haven't read. If you click on the number of replies, it tells you who replied. That's what I can think of, offhand

 

[DinosRBirds]

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that's good news for me also.

 

[EmtheFishLady]

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You could always hit "Mark all topics read". I hope this feature stays...I use it often.

 

[onlyme8]

This is great news!

I'm excited

 

[Lawton Park]

Where do I go to have a look at the new site.



When I first started my forum here in Australia I was using phpbb. All poultry forums here used phpbb so it was easy for members from other forums to use mine.

About 15 months later I made the decision to upgrade to vbulletin which 99% of my members have never used and to this day they still don't use my forum, I hope BYC don't have the same issues.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

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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.

 

[EmtheFishLady]

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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

I'm glad to hear it. I admit, I don't read all the topics...I tend to only click the ones that grab my attention.

Might take me a bit to find that button now though...

I'm getting too old to make changes Nifty.

 

[wolftracks]

OK I have to share something Nifty showed me.

You know those huge threads that you have to click the last page between the .... to get to the next section and do the same thing. Now all you have to do is put your curser over the .... and you can go directly to the page on a dropdown. Don't know why, but I LOVE that. Yes I'm easy!

I'm still having lots of problems, but hey, I had some here too. Some concerns others have had about some changes, are actually simpler for someone like me, so happy about those.

When we can in here, we had to learn our way around and how to do things. Eventually even I'll probably find the new site easier. At the moment I'm way behind, but then in the past couple of years, I haven't done much of anything else rather than email, one other forum and BYC. Never needed to keep up or learn anything else.

I bet the youngsters here will have a blast. Just do us a favor kids. Not too much play on the text size and colors. Makes it hard for lots of members to even open the threads.

All in all I think everyone is going to really like the new site. I have a slower high speed (yeah right) connection and I'm able to use it. I swear this is just a pinch over dialup at times.

 

[kelar]

I apologize if this has been posted somewhere, but how does one go about "kicking the tires" on the new site?

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

GFMs & PPMs can see here: https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=616799