Thread: Major Forum Changes Ahead

Update (Reorganized Classifieds Sections)

This is not a forum software update, but an update to how the forum is organized. Back on 2015-09-28 @Vadim made a thread in the Moderator's Lounge about wanting to reorganize a lot of the forum sections/sub-sections and the active staff at the time agreed. The first place to be tackled was the Classifieds sections, and a good plan was fleshed out. Well, for one reason or another it just never happened. Luckily that thread was cataloged in the Issue Tracker thread (another staff-only thread) and while it was forgotten, ultimately it never actually fell through the cracks.

I came across this whole thing when converting active issues from that Issue Tracker thread over to the new ToDo list. I decided to fast-track this work because (as a bonus) any improvement in this area would greatly reduce the loading time for the home page (which is currently far-and-away our slowest page load). I'd been considering manually caching that page for performance improvements, or something else similar. But reorganizing/consolidating things is a much better solution. I expect to continue this work as I have time.

Here is the post where things settled out:


There was certainly good talk about merging sections, not just reorganizing. There was also talk about removing the "Free" section (retaining and moving the existing threads of course) and just letting people post in the other sections with a price of "$0 (Free)". There was talk of other improvements as well. Certainly things could be better. But for now, I just went with what was already discussed and easy to implement. So if you've followed along, the "Cars" section got renamed to "Automobiles", the "Miscellaneous" section was renamed to "Non-Automotive Items", and all sections where car parts were sold have been placed under a new "umbrella" section called "Automotive Parts".

Before:



After:

Update (Tech Section accidentally allowed threads)

Speaking of "umbrella" sections... The Tech Section was supposed to be one of those, but there was one single thread attached to it (which was hidden from view unless a user navigated to that section in a very rare way). I've moved that thread to General SR20 and now disallowed threads in the Tech Section (of course threads can be created in the sub-sections therein). That ties up another loose end. Onward and upward.

good work man

Update (Version 1.7.15)

I was helping a member with their signature this morning. When forum staff edit another person's signature, the user gets a PM about it with the contents of the old signature, the contents of the new signature, and a mandatory "reason" for the change. Well that "reason" field was not carrying over to the refreshed form if the signature was previewed. There was also a minor issue with validating the length of the "reason". I've fixed both issues.