UPDATED COMMUNITIES Q&A CLINIC

Ben, I think the problem lies in two issues. Firstly no one from the Technical Team or contractor has been seen or heard from and one assumes it was their job and brief to get the site functioning correctly. Secondly it seems that people like yourselves are simply dumped on by having to deal with an issue way outside your normal task.  

I contacted Mike Clarke's office a few weeks ago when the site was having problems.  I did so again today. I asked if the Chief Executive was aware of the frustration and grief caused by the change and more particularly,as another poster pointed out, that this is 2013 and sites like this are the face of the RSPB. Answer:- "Probably not. But I will ensure he is told "

Now as this saga has been running since Wednesday one can only speculate as to why.  

I understand Bob and others frustrations but unless senior staff grasp the nettle and facilitate others we are likely to simply drift along.  

A former American President had a sign on his desk which read. "The buck stops here".

Mike, many thanks for your feedback.

In answer to it all I will say is, yes it is the responsibility of the technical team to get the site functioning correctly, this is something that they have not stopped working on since it went live and are continuing to do so as we speak. It was agreed that they would be left to get on with this to maximise how much and how quickly this gets done and for the mean time myself and other mods would simply keep an eye on the current community and try to alleviate any problems.

We have tried doing this by setting up this Q & A, doing any technical things we can and passing on all comments to the technical team, and generally having a presence on here to help show you we have not forgotten about you.

I have just spoken with a member of the technical team again, they assure me that as soon as each individual problem has been resolved and they are happy that it has been dealt with fully then we can update you on this.

Please bear with us, these things take time, involve various parties etc.

Yes, BOB - many Q's but almost no A's :-(

Oh, blast !

Hello everyone, once again.

I appreciate the comments that keep coming, I would like to reiterate that I am doing all I can to keep you updated and the guys with more technical experience are doing all they can to make the necessary changes.

Here is some latest information from the technical team that hopefully can help answer some initial questions, I appreciate it won't answer all questions but please bear with us.

Firstly let’s discuss performance as it is the top of list for both the RSPB and yourselves.  The recent upgrade has had a significant performance impact on the speed of the Community. Shortly after the initial deployment, we discovered that a Microsoft technology was causing the Community software to restart every 30 seconds. The new Community software, requires some more memory to be added to our webservers in order to cope with the demand on it.   We are looking to resolve this situation and apply new memory soon, however as you can imagine these things do not happen instantly.  Some other users have also noticed that the caching is not consistent between page requests, this also is being looked into as part of the memory upgrade and configuration review.  

Some background about the site:

The site is built using the Telligent Evolution platform. The previous site was running version 5.6 and we have upgraded to version 7.5

A company called Telligent produces the software and many high profile Community platforms (including Macmillan Community - community.macmillan.org.uk) are built using this technology.

We are working very closely with Telligent to address these issues and improve the performance of the Community.  The upgrade has been carried out for several reasons, but the most compelling reason is to ensure we continue to remain in support with Telligent and can begin to utilise the full power of this technology across the whole website.  We have endeavoured to minimise the number of changes from the old version to this version to help you maintain synergy between the sites.  The major differences between the sites are as follows:

• The forum thread view, all of the moderation links have been removed from the bottom of the post, instead the view is more like Facebook with the standard arrow at the top right of the post for actions.  We are going to attempt to make this more obvious, rather than just showing when the mouse is over the post.

• The home page now contains the activity story feed.  This does not affect performance because it is a system that specifically written to aggregate the content across the site.  It also is a continuous feed which means as you browse down the page reloads with additional content forever.  The purpose of this feed is to allow users to see the rich level of content across the site, including uploaded media, forum threads, friendships etc.  You can also directly interact with this feed allowing you to reply to a thread or comment or like content without leaving the home page.

• Notifications have been introduced; these allow you to see when something occurs on the site very much like Facebook and respond immediately.  Someone noticed a call-back to socket.ashx this again is not a performance thing and is related to the notification system.

• Reputation and content scoring, people have noticed the top posters on the right hand side in groups.  This new feature allows us to represent the top posters on the site. We will be fine tuning this and improving the scoring mechanism but the theory is that if you are one of the top contributors to the site (by number of posts initially), then your username will be within this list. However, we want to use this more across the site, allowing for badges, leader boards and a whole host of other ways of displaying the level of involvement you have in the RSPBs community.

• @mentions and #tags you can now like Facebook and twitter use the @ and # tags to include people or tag content.

• Liking is now part of the platform also.

Aside from performance and visual changes we are also working on small styling fixes to improve the fonts and experience to ensure the site moves forwards.

Keep the questions coming and we will do our best to make sure the site improves.

scylla said:

Yes, BOB - many Q's but almost no A's :-(

I have an sick feeling that the big issues which remain for me will be deemed unfixable/unchangeable because they are part of the basic, totally different, software which has been adopted despite us saying we didn't want major change, just smoother running.

 

For example, the new Private Message layout is HORRIBLE, with no member name or message title - the preview list merely gives the first few words of messages and one can't find out who they're from/to unless one highlights individual messages.  Before, we had a neat list of message titles with the names of sender/recipient and a clear indication as to whether they had been read.

Ben Scylla's point is well made and apart from any other factor must take up loads of space as do the Avatars with each one.  I guess it's well too late now but I think the majority on the LG site simply wanted what they had to run well and swiftly!.  One small thing that has improved is the box to insert a posh link. Previously, for me, it would take ages to appear properly and seconds to 'work' it. Now it is instantaneous on both counts.

Hi Mike & Scylla's, yes I agree Scylla's point is extremely valuable and has been noted.

Mike, I am glad you have found a positive and thank you for sharing that, hopefully many more to come!

You provide them. We'll say thanks!!.

I've been trying for a week to post a picture and haven't had any success, all I get is a message telling me the site administrator does not allow for the duplicate postings on this site?...This is one of many frustrating things on the almost impossible to use new site....Upgrade? not in the eye's everyone trying to use it, except maybe for those that are implementing the change.  Come on ,get your act together and fix it please.

Hi-

fixing the new update is known about and is being fixed HOWEVER it is not top priority and so other things may be done sooner.

Interestingly the RSPB switchboard was jammed at 1645 today and callers were being asked to leave messages. I got through to a high up ( non birder) eventually.

:)

S