I've been working round the clock to push this site to ready for launch. I need your eyes and keystrokes to check it out as roughly as you can.
Since you that are here are more familiar with the workings than most, try to think like a new visitor who will never see the old site.
TheBeachcats 2.0 is certainly not pretty or slick yet, all my focus as been on saving as much content as possible from the old site and making things work on all devices. I'll work on the looks after the launch. (and a nap)
The only thing I would miss, and it's minor, is the list of recent forum posts with the forum name, topic, and poster, on the home page. Kind of nice to see a small overview at the get-go. Other than that, I think it looks great and am looking forward to using it. I realize you have that information here as well, it's really just a layout preference.
Hi Damon
I am - like I said, it's more of a layout preference than anything else. Not a dealbreaker. I appreciate your efforts!
-Matt
Modified the "Recent Forum Posts" section to just have a list of the 10 most recent posts. I can't duplicate exactly like the old forum but the purpose is to let visitors know there is an active forum and draw them in.
I like it. I also liked the two columns that were on the home page, but that is using the desktop with a giant screen . . . probably not the same experience on mobile.Modified the "Recent Forum Posts" section to just have a list of the 10 most recent posts. I can't duplicate exactly like the old forum but the purpose is to let visitors know there is an active forum and draw them in.
@pm Yes, less scrolling this way, and the topic section was a little redundant since the recent posts lists shows the topic.
I like it. I also liked the two columns that were on the home page, but that is using the desktop with a giant screen . . . probably not the same experience on mobile.Modified the "Recent Forum Posts" section to just have a list of the 10 most recent posts. I can't duplicate exactly like the old forum but the purpose is to let visitors know there is an active forum and draw them in.
👍 👍 👍Â
Could we get a direct link on homepage of thebeachcats.com to this forum?
I've notice that Damon has migrated some of the previous original beachcats site forum post here. Well Done!! It's all coming together nicely.
@pm Yes, as of today we not only have the 20+ years of forums, topics, and posts from TheBeachcats.com forums (with a gap from about March to now) but ALSO, all of the forums, topics, and posts from the Catsailor.com forums.Â
I attempted to merge the users from the two, so if you were using the same email address on both sites, but had different usernames, they should all now appear here under your username. Let me know if that is the case. If someone was using two different emails for the two sites, they now have two usernames, one for each email.Â
It was a complicated thing to work out, and that's the best I could come up with.
Forum stats here after the Catsailor migration:
Forums 58
Topics 31,514
Posts 344,877
Members 42,556
And it is all searchable, hopefully the old posts will continue to be of value to sailors around the world.
@jonathan It won't be needed much longer. I am pulling the switch to have this be the only version of TheBeachcats.com either Tuesday or Wednesday.
Spectacular! Bravo!@pm Yes, as of today we not only have the 20+ years of forums, topics, and posts from TheBeachcats.com forums (with a gap from about March to now) but ALSO, all of the forums, topics, and posts from the Catsailor.com forums.Â
I attempted to merge the users from the two, so if you were using the same email address on both sites, but had different usernames, they should all now appear here under your username. Let me know if that is the case. If someone was using two different emails for the two sites, they now have two usernames, one for each email.Â
It was a complicated thing to work out, and that's the best I could come up with.
Forum stats here after the Catsailor migration:
Forums 58
Topics 31,514
Posts 344,877
Members 42,556And it is all searchable, hopefully the old posts will continue to be of value to sailors around the world.
Spectacular! Bravo!
Yes!
A couple observations. It seems the new format is slower than before.Â
Also, for the classified would it be to have a checkbox on the search to ignore the SOLD ads?
A couple observations. It seems the new format is slower than before. Also, for the classified would it be to have a checkbox on the search to ignore the SOLD ads?
@dwk
Thanks for the input! Is there a particular part of the site that seems slower than others?
Things should speed up, right now I've got almost all of the caching turned off to help track down remaining bugs i find in the logs.
The sold exclusion is a good idea, it doesn't seem to be a standard feature, so I'll see what can be done.
I have had several members reporting that they sometimes can't get logged in, it is a mystery do far because hundreds are logging in/out every day, but maybe they just arent reporting problems.Â
I want everything to function smoothly before doing a mass email announcement that would bring in a spike of traffic.
I tried a few pages this morning and there's no lag today. I'm mostly using Firefox for my browsing.Â
Anyway great job on the rewrite!
I tried a few pages this morning and there's no lag today. I'm mostly using Firefox for my browsing. Anyway great job on the rewrite!
Glad to hear it! Thanks
Hey Damon....
Love the new site!
However, I've been doing a lot of searches for different topics on the search feature, and many of the search results are not correctly linked to the correct thread. Many times they're linked to a similar topic thread, but not the actual thread. Case in point was "trailer lighting."
Thanks for your skilled work!
-doug
Try searching for "trailer light" with the quotes.
Or "trailer wiring"
Sometimes kind of have to play with the wording.
Try searching for "trailer light" with the quotes.
Or "trailer wiring"
Sometimes kind of have to play with the wording.
What I meant was that the search results many times don't match up with the thread that it's linked to, though both have the same key words, such as "trailer lights"
@cat-scratch I guess im not understanding.Â
Can you give the url or screenshot to results like you are describing?
Keep in mind the search is not super smart. It only knows if the word or part of a word in the search is present somewhere in the result.Â
Can't really give you a good example with a screen shot, as many of the search result items point to a single thread, but many times the result items should actually be pointing to completely different threads with the same key words.
It's as if the search is actually doing a proper search for the key words, but it might take a result item's thread address and assign that to the next few result items' address pointers, pointing many result items to the same thread, when in reality, those next few items are not within the thread that they're incorrectly pointing to.
I hope that makes more sense.
Ok, here's a simple example that I'm seeing....
Search for keyword 'Trailer'
Results:
result A points to address 101
result B points to address 101, but should point to another address
result C points to address 101, but should point to yet another address
result D points to address 203, correctly
result E points to address 203, but should point to a different address.
All these result items have the proper keyword within them.