Find out about what we’re doing and when we anticipate solving each issue. Regular updates will be posted here.
There have been a number of observations and very valuable feedback from the existing RSPB community user base, highlighting issues around performance, privacy, features that previously existed that have been omitted from the latest upgrade, usability, layout and questioning why the upgrade happened and how these issues have come to light
I will address these below.
Firstly let us address why the community has been upgraded. There are a number of reasons why we chose to upgrade the community, below are the two primary reasons:
There are a whole host of other reasons to upgrade the system, but for the sake of brevity I will move on to the issues you’ve reported and what we intend to do to rectify them.
We have issues with the speed of the community at certain times of the day. This often results in extremely long waits for a page to appear when accessing certain parts of the community.
We are using a number of analysis tools to identify bottlenecks in both the infrastructure (the web servers and database servers) and in the software. Our in house teams are analysing the results alongside our UK implementation partner and the software vendor.
There have been a number of suggestions from the community as to what the cause of the performance issues may be, we have investigated these alongside our own hypothesis and we are making progress towards identifying the issues and rectifying them.
As you know already we have increased memory in the system, this has made a slight improvement and we are continuing to give this top priority.
Whilst we make some of these changes to improve performance, there will be times when our actions cause the community to slow down, whilst the changes are being made. We will do our best to make these changes at times of low traffic.
Unfortunately, I cannot commit to how long this will take, but it remains top priority and every effort is being made to make the community a more responsive area of the site.
Many of you had originally observed that full names were being displayed in group membership lists, and within the web address when looking at your own or another community member’s profile. We have listened to your concerns, and we have changed this to ensure that only your chosen display name is used as a link or displayed in the membership lists. It was a conscious decision to allow names to be displayed, we are also doing this within the homes.rspb.org.uk micro site that some of you may have seen from our TV ad. The decision was made to start bringing some consistency across all of our digital estate. We accept that many of you were uncomfortable with this change and have reverted back to using “display names” only within the community.
Profiles are currently accessible to “anonymous” users; we hope to revert this back to only displaying profile details to users that are logged in. This will be in the next update to the community, once this is tested and signed off internally.
This is our second highest priority to resolve.
During the upgrade, we removed a number of features, we accept that some of these have caused as significant amount of disappointment by their removal. There are a few that were missed during testing, we apologise for this, we’re taking steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
We have a list of features that have been removed and that you have requested return, these include:
The list above is not exhaustive; we have a number of other things that RSPB and you want to see return.
The RSPB as you can tell has been transitioning through a rebrand. At the start of this project, the intention was to leave the “style” of the community as previous and to re-brand this at a later point. We took the decision to implement a brand change shortly before we went live, this caused some issues in certain sections of the site. As we re-release fixes and return previous functionality, we will also release improvements to the styling of the community. With hindsight, this probably wasn’t the best way to launch, many improvements have already been made, and we can only apologise for those who were significantly impacted.
There are also a number of features that have caused “usability” issues. Our in house team and UK implementation partner are looking at your feedback and addressing the usability issues. Again, this needs time to test and deploy, we will keep you in the loop as we go.
We are currently putting together a series of “how to” documents to help users that are having trouble in the meantime.
The implementation of the community upgrade hasn’t gone as well as the RSPB or you had hoped. After every project we carry out a lessons learned exercise to help us improve our processes, your feedback will feature quite heavily in this process, we already recognise that we should be consulting you more closely in what we change and when we change it.
There have been quite a few comments asking why “techies” are hiding behind mods, why senior managers aren’t standing out in front of you all, explaining their actions and why there is poor communication to the community users.
Our community moderators are there to act as a gateway and to collate and feedback your comments into the RSPB; we feel it would be better if the “techies” were focussing on improving the community, rather than responding directly to community users, it’s not a case of hiding behind anyone, more a case of a clear separation of responsibility.
Senior managers have been briefed by the project team as to your concerns, and they are as keen as you to see these issues rectified, they too are not hiding from the issues.
We are implementing a series of expected releases; we will post here when we intend to make the changes, what changes have been made and what issues we feel have been addressed by these changes.
We will be creating the “how to documents”
We will continue to monitor your feedback, respond where we can and keep you better informed.
Below is a distilled list of issues you have raised.
I've tried to keep the issues list to "known issues" and to ones that have been reported by more than one person. I am positive that I might have missed a few, I'm happy for you to bring that to my attention and I'll edit this post accordingly.
It doesn't list feature requests, we'll make a separate thread for those next week some time.
Similarly the list below doesn't list items reported that the RSPB believe we have fixed. I'll make a separate post here on Tuesday with that information, plus some info about when we think we can resolve these issues for you.
Have a read, post any feed back on the UPDATED COMMUNITIES Q&A CLINIC forum thread for now
Added 05 August 2013
Hi All,
At the moment we're busy testing below is the update on timings as I promised on Friday.
We're intending to put fixes in for the following by Tuesday 6th August 2013
Things unlikely to be resolved by Tuesday 6th August:
Issues unlikely to be resolved:
I have added the following issues to the list:
We're delaying the release of the fixes until Thursday 8th August to knock a few more off the list.
Apologies for the inconvenience, however, it will minimise the disruption and downtime of the Community
We have fixed the following:
In the next 2-3 weeks the following fixes will be published to the community:
The following user experience improvements will also be made:
Plus a number of "how to" posts will be published.
The profile speed issue still remains, we are working on this and as soon as we've identified and rectified the problem, we'll make this change. I anticipate a fix for this by the end of September.
F.
Please expect a further update from me by Monday 16th September informing the Community when these fixes and improvements will be made live.
These changes are planned for the week commencing 30th September 2013. The exact date is still to be confirmed.