HQ Forums Upgrade - July 2010

[Tom_T]

Side note: I don't know that I'd use Search as my sole means of navigating the Forums. It's one thing to use it to search for posts about a player, but if it's being used to find a favorite Forum to post in, there are more efficient ways to accomplish that.

[Kevin]

As long as it stays polite, I think it's a good way to help prioritize. Search is way more important to me than the font, so lots more pleas about Search, even repeated from one day to the next, will hopefully encourage HQ to move that to the head of the list. I appreciate that HQ is addressing the criticisms, but repeated, civil reminders about the things that are ruining the experience will probably help them address the criticisms in the proper order.

One man's opinion, or another man's petulant whining

[makelele]

HQ, would you prefer for us to keep our opinions to ourselves?

Because obviously there is no difference between stating one's opinion and petulantly whining over and over after HQ attempts to address the criticisms.

[Tom_T]

Search should be back to normal now. Did not realize after the upgrade that the search reindex had not completed... just did another run of it.

Did a search for "Heisey" and I see the recent threads now.

Yes, search seems to be back to normal now.

[MikeK@HQ]

Search should be back to normal now. Did not realize after the upgrade that the search reindex had not completed... just did another run of it.

Did a search for "Heisey" and I see the recent threads now.

[RAY@HQ]

HQ, would you prefer for us to keep our opinions to ourselves?

Of course not. Blast away, we can take it. Trust me, it wasn't our intent to have any of you notice this upgrade.

I'm told the search index is rebuilding right now. I just tried a search, and more (but not all) of the most recent results are coming back. Looks like that problem should be fully addressed in the next hour or so.

[Kevin]

Some of this whining is out of control. Sorry you have to deal with it, Ray. HQ's handling of this petulance has been commendable.

HQ, would you prefer for us to keep our opinions to ourselves?

[makelele]

Some of this whining is out of control. Sorry you have to deal with it, Ray. HQ's handling of this petulance has been commendable.

[RAY@HQ]

Howie, obviously we need to get the Search fixed. I think I was pretty clear in agreeing on that point. I was offering a temporary workaround

HQFML is in the "HQ-sponsored subscriber leagues" forum, btw.

[Howie M]

"Took me all of four clicks to get there."

Ray, that's several more than it used to take me.
That's not an upgrade, obviously.
I don't know which subforum BBHQFML's trashtalking thread was in.
Before the downgrade, I didn't need to know.
Now, I have to hope (I looked for it in several places, to no avail) that someone else posts there so I can find it again, and I guess write down a note next to my computer so that it doesn't take as long to find the next time.

No offense, Ray, but acknowledging the obvious is a good thing. Not having a useful Search function the week of the trading deadline is a significant hassle.
So there's no point in doing an "upgrade" at such a time, even if just on the tiny chance that the change isn't actually beneficial.

Let's just agree that an elephant is in the room, and then we can move forward.
It's tougher for everybody if anyone doesn't seem to notice the big fella....

[RAY@HQ]

While we're working on Search, you shouldn't need it to find recent content like the Reds team thread. Just go to the main forum page, find the MLB Teams subforum, the Reds thread is about 10 from the top. Took me all of four clicks to get there.

Similarly, each subforum (AL, NL, Clubhouse, Roster Mgmt, etc) is sorted by date of most recent post, so you can always go into any of those and see what activity there's been in the past couple of days, without using Search.

[Howie M]

Search is a BIG deal for me right now, in terms of the trade deadline, yes.

I don't really know what I'm missing as a result of this (so far) downgrade.
For instance, I was considered Heisey to replace my Victorino by noon tomorrow, but I don't know if there's been a recent post about Heisey's playing time possibilities here. I can't even find the Reds 2010 thread.

Thanks for the response you were able to provide, though.

I do think it would be help for HQ to make a clearer statement about negative impact on us as we near July 31.
Seems obvious, so why not just address it front and center?

[RAY@HQ]

Howie,

We're obviously sorry for any inconvenience here, but really I think the negative impact has been minimal. Couple of things you need to understand:

- vBulletin is a 3rd-party product, and we can't always just "leave well enough alone" as someone suggested, as there is a need to stay somewhat current with their newly-released versions to maintain our support, to pick up security fixes, etc.

- the upgrade we applied was "broken" in the sense that they didn't tell us that it was going to force us to change the look and feel that we had already configured. That was an "undocumented feature" of this upgrade. That will happen from time to time, but it wasn't expected. If we knew fully what we were getting into here, we may very well have chosen to do it at a different time.

My best technical explanation for you is that this isn't like rolling out an upgrade to MACK or Playerlink: we write those things ourselves, we test them, we support them, we know them inside and out. The forum software isn't homegrown. We pay someone for it... and as such, one of the things we're theoretically paying them for is that when we do an upgrade, "it's just supposed to work". We don't have a test forum to try an upgrade in first. We shouldn't need one. We've done many forum upgrades in the past, and you guys have never noticed. That's how it's supposed to go. Unfortunately, this time was a bit different.


All that said, are you missing any trade deadline information as a result of this upgrade? The forum works the same way as it used to. It just looks a little different. We'll get the search function straightened out, that's obviously a big deal. The other items, like the indicator of where you were in the new posts string when you last visited, aren't as critical as the search, but we'll get those taken care of too.

[Howie M]

I think it would be productive for HQ, which thankfully encourages communication with its members, to address two things at this point.

- Can we agree that the week of the trading deadline, in retrospect, was a really bad time to do this? The best customer service, to me, acknowledges errors. Yes, we all make them in our own lives. But the sooner a company admits the obvious, the better, imo.

- A simplified technical explanation as to how it's not possible to be sure that the search function works before launching an "upgrade" (p.s., by any definition so far it's not an upgrade. Better to call it a 'revamp' or something so that if it at first causes more problems than it solves, there's no Orwellian language vibe going on). I'm not tech-savvy, so it will be easy to convince me, lol.

I respect how frustrating changes can be when it's offered to what may seem to be an unpleasable audience.
But we're also paying customers to what seems to be a very profitable business, so that's inevitably going to raise expectations.

Thanks for the listen...

[billybill8]

Good to go. Thanks.