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.

Update (Version 1.7.16)

I noticed some member profile pages would never finish loading according to the browser. They did finish, but the browser kept presenting a loading status forever.
I determined it was an issue with the member's avatar. If the avatar was missing, a image that doesn't exist would be served, and never finish loading. So, I've fixed that.
While working on this I found some potentially useful performance evaluation links which I've posted to the ToDo list for future reference. There are plenty of other useful resources scattered throughout this huge thread that I hope to consolidate there as I find them.

Tl;DR: All my health issues mentioned in this thread over the years have been stress related and I'm on top of that and feeling great.

I've been reading this thread through (as I do sometimes to remind myself how far we've come, and pick up on anything I've forgotten to do) and realized I never gave a final health update.

As you may recall:

January 2018:

February 2018:

March 2018:



April 2018:

November 2018:


December 2018:

March 2019:


So that was a burning throat which began November 2017 (can you guess what was going on around that time? ) and then ~6 months later joined by sciatica-like symptoms in my left leg, followed eventually by nerve-damage-like symptoms in my right hand. All told it was a little over a year and a half of suffering.
I've actually been down this road before. Back in 2010 I developed odd symptoms that no specialist could pin down and went on for ~4 years until I finally realized it was all stress related which culminated in me moving roles at work, earning more money, and getting mostly stress-free. That cleared up my health issue completely back then.
So you can probably guess where this is going. It turns out all my newer health issues were also caused by stress, and I am decent at reducing that once I know that is my problem. Once again I ended up switching roles (this time at a new job), working from home, making more money, gaining free health care, and dropping all sorts of stress (which also meant taking a good break from working on the forum). Coincidentally our first child was born at this time as well, and it really helped to feel good again at that time.
Since then I've had some stressful times but I work on that and don't let it get to the point where it affects my body like it can.

So that's me putting a bow on the health topic in this thread. I am fully recovered and feeling good. Cheers.

Update (Version 1.7.17)

I've been giving some attention to the "back to top" links in the footer lately and it had me testing them out. It's a bit nuts, but they were never actually working properly. They always redirected to the home page! Well, I've fixed them, and then removed one of them since they were redundant. Instead of removing the obvious one (because it would mean we could remove an entire section of the footer) I removed the other one all the way on the right. This is so we can still have a substantial and identical looking footer, but more importantly this makes the footer narrower which plays better with mobile devices. The footer fits nicely on my tablet now, for example.