We have alluded to some changes that were forthcoming to the forum and to the front page. Those changes will be forthcoming Friday**, August 30th, 2024**.
Things that aren’t changing: forum.slowtwitch.com will get you here. Your username and password for the forum remain the same.
There may be a mild outage around 4 AM Eastern / 1 AM Pacific / 9 AM London / I’m not doing anymore time zones, sorry / as we clean up some loose ends and make the final switches in the back end. You may need to put in a fresh bookmark in order to hit the correct IP address.
2.) Yes, there are bugs. No, they are not features. (I have a running list of things that need to be tweaked.) Part of this is a result of some issues this morning that prevented this from going live during more predicted downtime, but it was too late to roll back on. For example, the old forum still being reachable when the name servers / IPs were all swapped.
But ultimately: yeah. We moved to a modern forum architecture that is more secure, and we moved our editorial site to a platform that will really allow us to create better stories for the millions of eyeballs that visit ST.
Not trying to pile on while you’re still ironing things out, but I noticed my direct messages / inbox / whatever are empty now (old ones did not get ported over to the new site).
Login was not working with my password - I had to have the site email me a link.
i now see the new forum in my mobile device. fear not. i’m on the job. but i have to learn how to make this place look more like the kind of place you and i want. gonna take me a few days to get it all sorted.
Maybe you know this, but for me, very recent posts are there, but everything else is 3days or more old. Kind of like if everything between Tuesday (ish) and this morning is gone. Some threads like the road cycling are completely gone. But maybe these are already on your list
I just want to say that I understand this was likely a huge undertaking behind the scenes. No matter how much you anticipate and plan, something always seems to pop up with these kinds of things.
People will complain regardless. People were critical of the old platform. People hate change. Maybe some of the assholes in the LR will now leave and make that place a little more inviting.
Another question… Is there an option for a “compressed view?” I thought this platform did that, but I cannot find it.
As it is, only a few topics show up per page - about half to a quarter the density of the old platform. Same with posts in a thread - they consume a crapton more vertical space so I only see three or four replies per page.
From a useability perspective one of the biggest issues I see is the poster icon(s) being off to the right of the thread titles. All the different colors and the circle shape grabs your eye and you are constantly having to fight between looking at the thread title and then being drawn back to this eclectic mix of bullseyes on the right.
Next, I think you need some gentle cell treatment. There’s a reason why lined paper exists and why spreadsheets have nicely defined cells. It’s a little too spacey and open.
