HQ Forums Upgrade - July 2010

[RAY@HQ]

Guys, above all, this is a question of tone. So, on both sides! Knock off the sniping.

[Lefty]

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.

I can't imagine buying a third-party software upgrade for my business without testing it first. There is no way that a business would install a general ledger, inventory, email, or any other software upgrade without testing the hell out of it first. Granted, a forum software does not have the criticality as those other examples do...unless one of your business' selling points is the sharing of information and ideas via your forums as is the case with HQ.

[TMac]

Coupla questions ... I used to be able to ...
1. Adjust font size and
2. Use different fonts

Are these features still available ?

Additional comment ... the emoticons are undistinguishable. They looked better, before. Keep tweekin fellas. I'll be patient.
Your continual efforts to improve all parts of the site ... even the Forums function, is appreciated.

[Patioboater]

Coupla questions ... I used to be able to ...
1. Adjust font size and
2. Use different fonts

Are these features still available ?

I don't recall if those were on the "Quick Reply" screen before, but you can still get to them and the other more advanced features by clicking the "Go Advanced" button on a reply. However, I think there used to be a button to take you to the advanced features directly, and I know the "Quote" function took you there first, whereas it now drops you into a "Quick Reply" screen.

All in all, I think I preferred getting dropped into the Advanced Reply screen directly. I have a tendency to use some of the functions in there, and I like the bigger size.

[Patioboater]

Here's a bit of weirdness I'm seeing today: thread titles don't seem to be appearing for about 75% of the threads in my "Subscribed Threads" list. Strange.

[RAY@HQ]

Weird. We changed the font, seems possibly related to that. I'll pass on.

[Astros34]

When I use the "New Posts" button, the posts are listed with date and time they were started, but only the date for the latest post. It helps to have the time so you know when you are done sifting through them all.

[Patioboater]

I'm still only seeing the titles for three of the top 25 threads in my "Subscribed Threads" queue. (FWIW, these three are "HQFML 2010 Trash-Talkin'", "New Forum format", and "Tigers 2010 in-season thread". I have no idea what makes them different. This happens to me on both of my computers (work and home) both of which are running IE 8.0.

Also worth mentioning -- one thing I've really come to like is the "Baseball HQ Tools" list at the top. That's really handy.

[Herb Scoresheet]

It's probably right in front of me, but is there a place to adjust the font size? The type appears to be about 50% bigger than on the old forum pages.

[JonE]

Polls do not appear to be working. I have seen two different polls posted in the last two days and the radio buttons appear but the options are all blank, thus:

Who is the true home run king?
o
o
o
o
o

[Howie M]

I still can't believe this is happening in the midst of our pre-trading deadline/maximum angst time.

I just wanted to observe in the "this is the year" thread that I am 3 pts out of 1st, but climbed to within 0.5 pts tonight - wait, no Lindstrom and Wagner blew my Wandy and Hanson wins in the 9th so I'm still 3 pts back.

But any search attempt I make for this popular thread leads me down a rabbit hole.

For something like this, at least it's not related to my stretch drive efforts.
But last week when I was mulling Heisey, I couldn't call up recent threads that might help.

Does anyone realize that the upheaval at the worst possible time is potentially harmful to its consumers?

How long does it take to fix a "search" bug, anyway?

sigh

[RAY@HQ]

Howie, I searched on "Two Year Plan" and the thread was one of the top 5 or so results. I'm not sure four innocuous words like "This Is the Year" are going to do well in the search. However, if you put quotes around the whole phrase, to make the search on *exactly* that four-word string, once again the thread you're looking for is in the first few results.

Oh, and the thread is here.

[Howie M]

Thanks for that.

Of course, on the previous version, all I had to do was recall a player name like Maybin or Qualls that was in the thread, and there it was pretty high, since they didn't have many threads on them.

Not sure why it didn't work, but the whole point is not to take a chance on confusion for any of us at this the second-most important time of year (only pre-draft weeks would be worse).

I always could just pop a name into the search box, and there's the thread I want.
Anything at all that changes that dynamic, near my Aug. 19 trade deadline, is a bad idea.

I thank you for your patience. Maybe we'd all feel better if the "sorry that there is some confusion" was extended to "sorry that we ever even considered making any changes to the message baords at this most critical time of year. We should have waited until November, and next time we will."

Hey, we all make mistakes. Damn sure I do.

[rugby12901]

Are you still working on bringing back the function that would separate post you haven’t read since you last visited the forum when you click the “new post” tab?

[Astros34]

Is t just me or is the forum formatting wamboozled all of a sudden?